e. Find examples of close relationship between rhythm or sound and feeling. Explain.

f. Find an example of a poem that uses an image to express a mood or an idea.

g. 1. Find three nature pictures that appeal to you.

2. Find a detailed word painting.

3. Find a picture created through poetic suggestion.

h. Find a poem that secures its effect through suggestion rather than through direct statement, that is, one that suggests more than it says.

i. Quote twelve passages illustrating the power of poetic suggestion.

j. Find two similes that are:

1. good because of the similarity of the things compared.

2. good because of their connotation.

3. too strained or too commonplace or too unlike.

k. 1. Find three metaphors that seem to you good. 2. Find two examples of effective personification. 3. Find two examples of onomatopoeia.

4. Find two examples of metonymy. (Define) 5. Find two examples of symbols. (Explain) 7. Find examples of tone color secured by:

1. alliteration

2. rhyme

3. use of both masculine and feminine rhymes

4. end-stopped and run-on lines

5. deep-toned vowels

6. soft consonants, or liquid and sibilant consonants m. Find a poem with a thought expressed through: 1. similes or metaphors

2. symbols

3. images

4. allegory

5. the sonnet form

n. Find one poem the thought of which strikes you as either true or interesting, or both, and state that thought in your own words.

o. Find a poem the inspiration of which is in:

1. nature

2. personality (character)

3. human relationships

4. universal human experience

5. the commonplace in man or nature

6. literature

7. music

8. painting

9. human history

10. God or religion

p. Find a poem that is helped by simplicity of pattern and of language.

q. Find a poem that uses a complicated pattern.

r. Find a sonnet. Give its metrical name and its rhyme scheme. s. Find a poem in blank verse. Give its metrical name. Find an irregular verse in it. Find an end-stopped line; a run-on line. t. Find a poem written in quatrains. Give the metrical name of its verses and its rhyme scheme.

u. Find a poem written in rhymed couplets.

v. Find an effective use of refrain-one that has a haunting effect on the melody and on the emotional appeal.

w. Find a poem that varies its meter for a purpose and state what is gained by the variation.

x. Find a pattern that seems to you free from any definite rhyme scheme or metrical plan.

y. Find a line with the prevailing foot iambic; trochaic; anapestic; dactylic.

z. Find examples of:

1. spondees

2. omitted syllables

3. unaccented syllables added at the end of a verse.

CHAPTER IV

PROSE FICTION

WHAT PROSE FICTION IS

Prose fiction is just another name for all stories in prose about imaginary happenings to imaginary people. Sometimes some of these characters and events

What prose fiction is

are true to fact, but in the main a work of fiction is the creation of the imagination. It is true in various ways, but it is not a record of actual happenings to real people.

Almost everyone reads fiction. The most obvious reason is that everyone likes a story. We begin to be interested in the adventures of imaginary characters almost as soon as we are capable of understanding spoken language; we demand again and again the adventures of Miss Muffet and the Spider and of the House that Jack Built.

Fiction as entertainment

What are the reasons for the fascination that these imaginary people and events have for us? In the first place, we read stories for entertainment-to while away an idle hour. Thus we read light fiction on a railway journey or when we are convalescing from an illness. Many books exist for just this temporary entertainment. Such books have little or no permanent interest and are rarely reread.

Fiction offers escape from reality

A deeper reason why we read fiction is that we, unconsciously perhaps, seek thereby to escape for a time from reality. We like to forget our humdrum lives and petty troubles and to identify ourselves with characters in an imaginary world. For this reason, as children, we reveled in the story of Cinderella, where the

abused little stepdaughter achieves the reward of virtue. For this reason we enjoy escaping from our own age of hustling commercialism to the "days of old when knights were bold" and Robin Hood eluded the Sheriff of Nottingham; when Ivanhoe rescued Rebecca from the hands of her persecutors; when Jim Hawkins, crouched in the apple barrel, listened to the seadogs plotting against his life. For this reason, too, we like to read about the lives of people who live in lands and climates different from our own. The mysterious odors and sounds and sights of India, for instance, are made romantically real to us by Kipling's Kim; the rough but humorous and wholehearted life of the western pioneers in Roaring Camp and Poker Flat is made a part of our experience through the stories of Bret Harte; the quaint charm of life in a little Scotch village is revealed to us in Barrie's Sentimental Tommy, The Little Minister, and Auld Licht Idylls. Many writers to-day produce "best sellers" which owe their popularity to their portrayal of life on western cattle ranches or in the northern woods of Canada, regions not familiar to most people.

Fiction as a life

commentary on

A third and more serious reason why we like to read fiction is that it often brings reality closer to us. For instance, George Eliot's books endure partly because the difficulties that her characters meet are precisely such difficulties as people have to meet in real life. The problems of Silas Marner, of Adam Bede, of The Mill on the Floss are problems arising out of human nature; they will be of interest as long as human nature is what it is. A great many human beings are faced with the necessity of accepting the consequences of their own acts just as Godfrey Cass and Maggie Tulliver and Hetty Sorrel are. A great many of us, like Silas Marner and Dolly Winthrop, are forced to grope blindly for faith in the midst of the obvious cruelties and injustices of life.

Fiction as a picture of life

Sometimes, too, a book is attractive to us in this way not because of any particular problems or conditions that it presents, but because it seems to us "true to life." It gives us pleasure to recognize its people as true. Stories of child life, of school and college life, of country life-"human interest" stories of all kindsappeal to us for this reason. We say, "How true that is!" or, "I've felt that way myself!" and we thereby gain sympathy and understanding because we see that our experiences are other people's experiences, too. Test this by reading any good story about children and then seeing how much more sympathetically you look at children-just because the story helped you to understand them.

It is also interesting to notice to what the interest in a story is due. We like some books merely for their story;

Sources of interest in fiction

usually we do not read these more than once. Others we like for charm of setting, and to

these we return more frequently. Once our imagination has been touched by a story of far away and long ago, the glamor is upon us, and we return again and again to be once more under its spell. Still other books attract us because of their characters; it is to these, probably, that we return most often. One who has made the acquaintance of the inimitable characters of Dickens, for instance, can hardly fail to wish to renew that acquaintance. More than one person has felt a lifelong friendship for Jane Eyre, or for Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, or for Sentimental Tommy, Huckleberry Finn, or Colonel Newcome. One of the chief charms of reading, and especially of rereading, works of fiction lies in the hold that these friends of our imagination have on us. A fourth source of interest in a story is the way in which the author writes, that is, his style. Once one grows to like the flavor of Dickens's humor, Thackeray's satire, Hawthorne's sensitiveness, or Steven