Practice IB English A Lit Topic Poetry with authentic exam-style questions for both SL and HL students. This question bank focuses on the exact syllabus content for Poetry and mirrors Paper 1, 2 style where relevant.
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The following text is a poem by Ada Merrivale.
What the Drawer Kept
I was seven when the drawer said open me,
the third one down, that stuck and then gave way
to spools of grey thread, buttons like small coins,
a thimble worn to silver at the crown.
I took it. Not for need. For the cool weight
of it, the way it fit my finger like
a helmet made for one soft-headed thought.
All summer it lived inside my sock drawer,
under the folded dark, a stolen moon.
When she asked had I seen it, I said no,
and watched my own voice leave me, smooth and quick,
a fish that would not come back to my hand.
She is gone now. The thimble is not gone.
It sits here on my desk and holds the light
the way a small confession holds a room,
saying nothing, asking to be said.
I have kept it longer than I kept her face.
Some things you steal become the thing that keeps you.
I turn it over. Silver. Cool. Awake.
The drawer is closed. The lie is still ajar.
Discuss the ways in which the poet uses imagery to explore the speaker's relationship with a childhood theft and the guilt it leaves behind.
The following text is a poem by Norah Elamin.
Vespers for a Clay Lamp
Each evening I lift the small clay bowl
and coax the wick up from its bed of oil.
The match complains, then settles to a bead
of amber that leans east, then stands upright.
I did not choose this hour; it chose me,
the way a tide selects a certain stone
and returns to it, and returns to it again.
The flame is not a prayer. It only leans.
Yet I have watched it hollow out the dark
and lay a coin of gold across the sill,
and I have felt the small heat find my wrist
like a thumb pressed once against a pulse.
My mother lit a lamp. Her mother too.
The oil is cheap. The saying of the words
is cheaper still, and costs me everything.
I do not know the name of what I thank.
Some nights the wick drowns early in its dish
and I relight it, patient as a nurse.
Some nights it burns until the window greys
and I wake to a black thread of smoke
still writing something upward, still unread.
I keep the lamp. I do not keep the faith.
Discuss the ways in which the poet uses imagery to convey the speaker's ambivalent relationship to a daily ritual.
The following text is a poem by Dalia Fenwick.
Weights and Measures
Before the light has learned the square
she lifts the shutters, one by one,
and lets the cold rehearse its trade
across the trestles scrubbed to bone.
The scales hang open like two palms
that ask for nothing, hold their doubt;
she tips the brass, she coaxes true
the trembling needle in and out.
Apples banked in careful tiers,
the bruised ones turned to face the wall,
a pyramid of small persuasions
built to look as if it cannot fall.
She counts the float, the cold-eyed coins,
and warms them slowly in her fist
until they carry back her heat,
a currency of what persists.
The first of them arrives to haggle;
she names a price and lets it stand.
The morning weighs her, gram by gram,
and finds the measure of her hand.
Discuss how the poem's imagery presents the market seller's labour and dignity.
The following are two previously unseen literary passages, from two different literary forms. Write a guided analysis of each passage.
Text 1 is a poem by Della Fenwick.
The clock has kept the hallway all these years,
a tall dark sentinel against the wall,
its brass face yellowed to the color of tea,
its pendulum a slow deliberate tongue.
It does not tell the time so much as weigh it,
dropping each second like a coin through water.
The house has learned to breathe in its long meter.
At night I hear it measuring the dark,
the small machinery of its patience turning,
teeth on teeth, a whispered arithmetic.
My father wound it every Sunday morning,
his hand a key, the key a kind of prayer,
and when he died the clock ran on for days
until it stopped, mid-sentence, in the hall.
Now no one dares to touch the frozen hands.
We leave them pointing at a random noon
as if the hour he left had earned its keep.
Dust settles on the glass like quiet snow.
The weights hang still, two lungs that will not fill.
And yet I stand here, listening for the beat,
the way you press an ear to a closed door,
half sure the silence has a heart behind it.
Text 2 is an excerpt from Return to Sender, a play by Ambrose Kito. In the attic of an old house, Philip helps Margot clear her late aunt's belongings and finds a box of unopened letters addressed to Margot, who left the house at nineteen.
Title: Return to Sender
Setting: An attic under the roof of an old house, late afternoon. A slant of dusty light. Cardboard boxes, a broken lamp, a dressmaker's dummy standing in the shadows.
Characters: MARGOT (sixty, stands with her arms folded), PHILIP (thirties, in work clothes, kneels beside a tea chest)
Text 1: Discuss the ways in which the poet uses imagery to convey the speaker's relationship with time, memory, and loss.
Text 2: Discuss how the playwright uses dialogue and stage directions to reveal the impact of a long-hidden betrayal.
The following are two previously unseen literary passages, from two different literary forms. Write a guided analysis of each passage.
Text 1 is a poem by Corin Alvestad.
The last bus breathes at the empty stop,
its doors folding open on nobody.
I climb aboard the long lit box
and take my usual seat near the back.
The city slides by in amber panes,
each streetlight a coin dropped in dark water.
Shuttered shops rehearse their own reflections;
a fox crosses the road like a rumour.
The driver hums to keep himself awake.
We are the only two the night has kept,
carried past houses where the lamps are out,
past windows holding their small blue fires.
At the depot the timetable lies,
promising mornings I no longer trust.
The seats are warm from strangers who have gone.
I press my forehead to the cold glass,
and the road unwinds its grey thread
under wheels that will not let me sleep.
Somewhere a clock is loosening the hours.
The bus leans into the turn like a tired horse,
and the city, for once, forgets to watch me,
and lets me be a light among its lights.
Text 2 is an excerpt from The Nightporter's Door, a play by Emmet Larkspur. Late at night outside a locked office building, Nell, locked out without her pass, pleads with Hodge, the night porter inside, to let her in.
Title: The Nightporter's Door
Setting: A small pool of light outside a glass office door. Night. A buzzer intercom on the wall.
Characters: HODGE (a night porter in a too-large uniform, sits inside with a flask), NELL (knocks on the glass, insistent)
Text 1: Discuss the ways in which the poet uses imagery to convey the speaker's experience of the city at night.
Text 2: Discuss the ways in which the playwright uses dialogue and stage directions to develop the relationship between HODGE and NELL.