Poem Analysis: Success and the Past

XAT 2023 · VALR · Hard · Poem Comprehension

Passage / data set

Read the poem and answer the TWO questions that follow.

The slow person you left behind when, finally, you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command, where is he while you walked around the shaved lawn in your plus fours, organizing with an electric clipboard your big push to tomorrow? Oh, I have come across him, yes, I have, more than once, coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian, Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished not just in themselves but by the stories we put in with beginnings, ends, surprises: the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother flailing in the millpond beyond the weir, dragged down by her woolen skirt. He doesn't see you as a story, though. He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines, he chorteles. When your barometric pressure drops and the thunder heads gather, he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with the study little pencil he steals from the public library. He asks me to look out for you.

Question 1 of 2

Which of the following BEST captures the theme of the poem?

  1. A.

    The poem is exploring the lives of the rich and the poor

  2. B.

    The poem is examining a loss of trust between old friends

  3. C.

    The poem is meaninglessly brooding over the past

  4. D.

    The poem is analysing a person's past and present

  5. E.

    The poem is celebrating success and moaning losses

Question 2 of 2

Which of the following statements BEST interprets the lines "He doesn't see you as a story, though/He feels you as his atmosphere"?

  1. A.

    You are haunted by your past

  2. B.

    You are larger than life

  3. C.

    You are not a narrative of the past

  4. D.

    Your present subsumes your past

  5. E.

    You are an extension of the past

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