The Eyes Have It! Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Tell-Tale Heart

Edgar Allan Poe published "The Tell-Tale Heart" in 1843. The story is told by a madman, who tries to convince his auditor that he is not insane because of the calm manner in which he can relate his tale of a methodical murder of a man he shared a house with.

In the end, he is caught by law officers after he confesses his crime because he believes he can still hear the old man's heart. Whether he truly hears it, imagines he hears it, or hears the palpitations of his own nervous heart is left to the reader to decide.

Some critics have argued that the story is truly about how the maniacal narrator destroys himself; his attempt to destroy the "eye" is symbolically his attempt to destroy "I", or himself. More to the point, the lunatic's obsession with the physical senses leads to his own undoing. One should see his or her essential self as more than something physical.

Others argue that the old man's eye represents surveillance--by God, by conscience, by death, by society, or perhaps by a father figure; Poe and his foster father had quite a rocky relationship.

Answer: Robert Browning

Robert Browning lived from 1812 to 1889. He fell in love with Elizabeth Barrett almost immediately after reading her published poetry and seeking her out to meet her in person. Barrett was the victim of a tyrannical father, so Browning and she eloped and escaped to Italy, where they enjoyed a most passionate marriage. "Love Among the Ruins", first published in 1853, is a poem contrasting a rich and powerful king, who possesses a glorious city and is served by thousands of people, to a common man who has but one person in his life, a woman he loves and is now rushing to meet among the ruins of that king's once great city.

The lines quoted in the question refer to how powerful the eyes are, how they can "hold" another's face without physically grasping a person as the hands do.

Then when two rush together to kiss each other passionately they "extinguish sight and speech", meaning they close their eyes and press their mouths together, thus communicating in a way much more meaningfully than they ever could with words.

Answer: blackbird

Wallace Stevens wrote "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", and the source I've used for the quotations is the 1931 reprinting of his first book of poems called "Harmonium". The poem supposedly reflects Stevens' philosophy that our understanding of reality is controlled by our perception, and our perception is constantly being altered.

The poem also reflects the imagist movement of the early twentieth century, a movement that required poems to state nothing and be without rhyme or meter while focusing on one central image.

This poem relies on thirteen images, of course, but each image is described much the way an imagist poet would have. The beginning of the poem focuses on one single eye as the only item functioning amidst a world of stark contrast--white and black, cold and warmth, etc., as if to suggest our relying upon our senses (primarily our vision) to make sense of the complexities of the world around us.

Some other images or lines from the poem . . . "I was of three minds, / Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds" . . . "A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one." . . . "It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing / And it was going to snow. / The blackbird sat / In the cedar-limbs."

Answer: Ben Jonson

To write "Song: to Celia", Ben Jonson created his own version of a poem that had been circulating through England for some time in various forms; furthermore, the words of the traditional English verse were a paraphrase of some prose statements by the third-century Greek sophist Philostratus.

By the eighteenth century, the poem had been set to music by an anonymous composer and become a popular bar song. The opening lines speak of the ability of the eyes by comparing them to mouths and tongues, which people use to make pledges or vows with, perhaps suggesting that the language spoken by our glances is more spiritually binding than that spoken by our tongues. Immediately following these two lines, Jonson leaves off his discussion of eyes to compare the mouth to a cup: "Or leave a kiss but in the cup, / And I'll not look for wine".

Answer: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886, almost all of that time in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her reclusiveness was not always existent but grew gradually throughout her life until she ultimately would not leave even her own room. Before her self-imposed seclusion, however, her letters and those of others have provided evidence of a few passionate and lengthy affairs. "I heard a Fly buzz--when I died" is one of her most well-known poems.

It represents not only her theme of wrestling with understanding death but also her tendency to write many of her poems from the perspective of someone other than herself; the speaker of this poem is obviously someone who has died and is speaking from the afterlife.

Answer: Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope published "Essay on Man" in 1734. It was a bold attempt on his part to "vindicate the ways of God to man", to quote a line that pays homage to John Milton's "Paradise Lost", which attempted to "justify the ways of God to men". However, while Milton sought a Christian explanation for the existence of evil in the world, Pope admittedly attempts to offer a more universally inclusive explanation.

He attempts to rely on logic and reason to explain the existence of evil. One of the main explanations Pope settles on is man's pride, man's tendency to believe it could do a better job of planning the world than God could.

As the quotation in the question indicates, man is constantly complaining about his shortcomings and lack of perfection.

However, Pope defends the existence of the Great Chain of Being and argues that there has to be a creature in existence called "man" and that the definition of "man" would be altered if we were created any differently from what we are. We cannot have a greater intelligence, for then we would be angels or God; likewise, we cannot have microscopically powerful eyes, for then we would be flies.

In other words, if we humans had any more advantages than what we currently have, then we would no longer be humans, and if there were no humans, then the thread of the universe would come unraveled.

Answer: Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton wrote "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" around 1979. The title alludes to William Butler Yeats' "To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing", in which the speaker attempts to praise someone whose efforts resulted in failure. The object is not the accomplishment of a goal but rather the attempt to achieve a goal in the first place. Sexton picks up this same theme but praises her friend's failed efforts as a "triumph".

She does this by praising Icarus' flight. Icarus put on the wings of feathers and wax made by his father Daedalus; then he flew too close to the sun and plummeted back to the earth to die.

However, Icarus, in Sexton's poem, climbs to heaven and achieves the glory of the sun despite the warnings of "his sensible daddy [who] goes straight into town". Obviously, those who attempt greatness despite those who would hold us back achieve greatness in their courageous attempts, not in their successful completion of goals. Those who live a conservative life will live safely, but their accomplishments will be small; they will go only "into town" while the brave spend their lives "acclaiming the sun".

Answer: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was published in 1798 in a book called "Lyrical Ballads", a collaboration between Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Wordsworth contributed about six lines to the 625-lined poem and gave Coleridge the ideas of the shooting of the albatross and the eventual navigation of the mariner's ship by the re-animated corpses of the other sailors.

The majority of the rest of the poem is based on the dream of another of Coleridge's friends, Cruikshank.

The lines in the question are from the beginning of the poem and speak of how the ancient mariner must force the Wedding-Guest to listen to him through hypnotism. At first, the Wedding-Guest appears to be a random victim, but the reader learns at the end of the poem that a supernatural power compels the ancient mariner to travel from place to place and then tell his story to someone of the supernatural power's choosing. If the mariner refuses, he is wracked with pain.

The poem itself is an argument for the existence of things beyond this natural world and our understanding as well as a defense of the sanctity of all life.

Answer: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some students in my American Literature survey often propose that Emerson was high on mushrooms or something else when he wrote these words. However, they tend to offer this explanation for most everything they read, and various respected literary critics offer an alternative explanation. Emerson metaphorically refers to himself as an "eye-ball" because he wishes to explain that when he is in nature--God's country--all functions cease except sight.

He does nothing but look and absorb the light, the primary functions of the eye. Why, however, is he transparent? He also wishes to suggest that his physical self ceases to be or at least that his focus on himself ceases.

He ceases to be an egotist or a self-centered individual when he is in nature becasue he is focused on God or the Universal Being or the Oversoul. That which is he fades and is replaced by that which is spiritual or of God.

Answer: Iago

Iago, who is perhaps the most diabolical of all of Shakespeare's villains, speaks these words to Othello during a rare moment when he seems to be offering wise advice. However, as Iago himself states elsewhere in the play, "When devils will the blackest sins put on / They do suggest at first with heavenly shows". Iago is most capable of appearing genuinely and compassionately concerned about others when it suits his selfish purpose to do so. Iago knows that he is on one level endearing himself to Othello by seeming to care about him while he is on another level planting the seed of jealousy and suggesting to Othello that he has something about which he should be jealous.

He can spur Othello on to jealousy and self-destruction by pretending to be steering him away from such things. Iago is, of course, the master manipulator. Shakespeare's "Othello" is the earliest written record we have of the phrase "green-eyed monster", so he is often given credit for having coined it.

Some have speculated that the phrase's origin lies in the tendency of felines, which are often green-eyed, to toy with their prey before killing it.

Others argue that the green is a reference to bile and its perceived connection to envy in past cultures.