<em>Which word best describes the tone of this excerpt?</em>
<em>The correct answer is D. Sympathetic</em>
- <em>The word that best describes the tone is sympathetic. When the driver says, “Times are changed, don’t you know?” is looking for a change in the mind of his listener. He is trying to cause a reaction so that the listener makes sense of the reality. In the sentence, “Get your three dollars a day, feed your kids” The driver is asking his listener to do the actions that matter, he is asking the listener not to deviate from the path that is going to take him or her to live day by day. During the complete excerpt, the driver is showing compassion and sensitivity to the listener’s emotions.</em>
Explanation:
The poem opens with the poet watching the deserted South Boston Aquarium, which he had visited as a child. The ruined building is symbolic both of his lost childhood and of the decay of Boston, undergoing massive urban renewal, which upsets such milestones as the Statehouse and the sculpture of Colonel Shaw.
The statue causes the poet to think of Shaw, an abolitionist’s son and leader of the first black regiment in the Civil War. Shaw died in the war, and his statue is a monument to the heroic ideals of New England life, which are jeopardized in the present just as the statue itself is shaken by urban renewal.
Images of black children entering segregated schools reveal how the ideals for which Shaw and his men died were neglected after the Civil War. The poem’s final stanzas return to the aquarium. The poet pictures Shaw riding on a fish’s air bubble, breaking free to the surface, but in fact, the aquarium is abandoned and the only fish are fin-tailed cars.
This poem is a brilliant example of Lowell’s ability to link private turmoil to public disturbances. The loss of childhood in the early section of the poem expands to the loss of America’s early ideals, and both are brought together in the last lines to give the poem a public and private intensity.
The poem is organized into unrhymed quatrains of uneven length, allowing a measure of flexibility within a formal structure.
Parallel structure means using the same pattern of words to show that at least two ideas are equally important as each other. Parallel structure can be used to create a rythem or a pattern in certain types of sentences.
