Spring's Eternal Hopes Trivia Quiz

Answer: Percy Bysshe Shelley

At the time of Shelley's writing these words, he was experiencing a dark and depressing time. Because of his abandonment of his wife Harriet Westbrook to elope with Mary Godwin and his radical political and social views, many of his supporters in England had turned on him.

After Harriet's eventual suicide, the courts denied Shelley custody of his and Harriet's children. He and Mary then fled to Italy, where their two children died within nine months of each other. At the brink of despair he reevaluated his view of life and decided that hope was the moral duty of mankind. Thus, he maintained that after every winter we experience in this life, there is a spring that follows. Of course, then he drowned when he and a friend were caught in a storm on the sea.

Answer: "The Canterbury Tales"

The lines quoted in the question are the opening lines of "The General Prologue" of "The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer, an English poet who lived from circa 1343 to 1400. The narrator of "The Prologue" goes on to explain that folk begin to long to participate in pilgrimages as soon as the spring occurs. Of course, the association of rebirth and spring would be also associated with a rebirth or revival of one's spirituality.

The characters in Chaucer's tales -- the Knight, the Miller, The Wife of Bath, and many others -- are on a journey to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket, who was murdered in the Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.

Answer: E. E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings lived from 1894 to 1962. He and a friend joined the ambulance corps in France during World War I, and after writing home about the horrible way the French were handling things, they found themselves in a French prison. He wrote a book about this experience in a book called "The Enormous Room".

In addition to writing some volumes of poetry, Cummings was also a painter. The quoted lines are from a poem often referred to as "in Just-". Although the word Cummings has coined is "Just-spring", meaning the very beginning of spring, the poem is referred to as "in-Just" because poems without titles are often refered to by their first lines.

Answer: William Carlos Williams

"Spring and All" is from a 1923 volume of poems also entitled "Spring and All". In fact, the poem itself is untitled, but as it was the first poem in the book, it is also referred to as "Spring and All". Williams lived from 1883 to 1963 and was a much respected poet; he won the National Book Award in 1950, the Bollingen Prize in 1953, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1962.

He was also a much respected physician; he maintained an old-fashioned practice of making housecalls, had an excellent bedside manner, often played the role of counselor, and delivered over 2,000 babies.

Answer: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins lived from 1844 to 1889, and while most of the poets of this Victorian Age wrote in a more traditional style, Hopkins was something of an experimenter. Hopkins had more of an impact on the early twentieth century and the moderns because he did not publish while he was alive.

As a Jesuit priest, he felt that publishing poetry would bring attention to himself and thus appear to be an egotistical act. However, he also fretted that he could not excel as a poet without an audience of critics. Thus, he found himself trapped and believed that he had failed as both a priest and a poet.

Some of his other famous poems include "God's Grandeur", "Pied Beauty", and "The Windhover".

Answer: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Tennyson lived from 1809 to 1892. He was Poet Laureate of Great Britain from 1850 until his death in 1892, and he received a peerage in 1883 and took up his position in the House of Lords. Other titles of his include "Idylls of the King", "The Lady of Shalott", "Ulysses", "Tears, Idle Tears", and "Crossing the Bar". "Locksley Hall" is an early masterpiece of Tennyson's written in 1835.

It is about a soldier who stops at the fictional Locksley Hall to reminisce of his childhood spent there and of a lover who rejected him for another; the poem then evolves into a contrast between the glories of civilization and the joys of a rustic life.

Answer: "Home Thoughts, from Abroad"

Robert Browning lived from 1812 to 1889. He wrote all of the poems listed as answers except "Dover Beach", which was written by Matthew Arnold. His relationship with and marriage to fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett is considered one of the greatest romances of British society. Barrett's tyrannical father forbade her to marry and kept her at home until she was 39, when she eloped with Browning. Browning had read her poetry and began visiting her at her home when the two fell in love. Though she had become somewhat of an invalid, he rescued her from her father, and the two of them ran away to Italy, where they wrote some of the greatest love poetry ever!

Answer: Robert Frost

Robert Frost lived from 1874 to 1963. Although born in California, he moved to the New England area when he was eleven years old with his mother after his father died. Except for a few years spent in England, he lived the rest of his life there and filled most of his poetry with rural New England life.

Some of his most famous pieces are "The Road Not Taken", "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", "Fire and Ice", "Nothing Gold Can Stay", and "Death of a Hired Man". The lines in the question are from "Two Tramps in Mudtime", and they capture perfectly the tickled nature of a spring day.

The lines are also representative of Frost's conversational tone that he used in his art.

Answer: Emily Dickinson

As Emily Dickinson's poems were untitled, the poem above is often referred to as #1333. Almost all of her poetry was published after her death, and as she did not title or date what she wrote and scribbled what she did write on scraps of paper and cards found all over her home, scholars have had difficulty arranging her poems in any sort of accurate order. Dickinson once published a very few poems early in her life, but the male editor altered her words; she was so offended that she never published again.

Answer: William Shakespeare

You should read Sonnet #98 in it's entirety, especially if you are still in love with anyone. It is a beautifully written poem with a powerful ending. Shakespeare suggests that the beauty of spring is but a shadow of the one he loves and misses, and trying to content himself with these lesser joys is as satisfying as settling for someone's shadow instead of that person him or herself would be.