To Elsie quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which labels best describe “To Elsie”?

   • Poetry, Romantic Poetry & Blank Verse
   • Correct answer: Poetry, Modernist Poetry & Free Verse
   • Poetry, Victorian Poetry & Dramatic Monologue
   • Poetry, Metaphysical Poetry & Sonnet Sequence
   • Poetry, Confessional Poetry & Villanelle

   Poetry, Modernist Poetry & Free Verse is the best fit. Written in 1923, the poem is modernist: it breaks old patterns, jumps between images, and takes a hard look at modern American life. It is free verse: no rhyme and no regular beat, just short lines whose breaks are placed by the poet’s ear.

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2. 2

   Question 2. What does the poem’s opening claim say happens to “The pure products of America”?

   • They spread across the world and teach others their ways
   • They grow rich in the cities and forget the countryside
   • Correct answer: They go crazy, from Kentucky’s mountain folk to north Jersey’s valleys
   • They stay pure only as long as they remain in one place

   The poem opens with a blunt statement: “The pure products of America / go crazy—”. It then names examples: “mountain folk from Kentucky” and “the ribbed north end of / Jersey / with its isolate lakes and / valleys”. The word pure can be read with bitter irony: people of old, unmixed stock, cut off in lonely places, are not thriving but breaking down.

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3. 3

   Question 3. The poem says the young people’s cheap finery comes “from imaginations which have no / peasant traditions to give them / character”. What do these imaginations lack?

   • Correct answer: Old customs handed down that give a life shape and meaning
   • Money enough to buy anything finer than cheap, showy ornaments
   • Schooling that would teach them to read and to write well
   • Any wish at all to dress up in finery and go out at night

   The speaker says these imaginations have no “peasant traditions to give them / character”. In older, settled villages, songs, festivals, crafts and customs were handed down and gave people something to stand on. Without them, the poem suggests, people reach for “cheap / jewelry” and flashy “gauds” instead. Many readers take this as the poem’s picture of a rootless country. The poem never says the problem is money or schooling, and the young people clearly do dress up: they are “tricked out that night”.

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4. 4

   Question 4. According to the poem, how does the girl end up in “some hard pressed / house in the suburbs”?

   • She runs away from her family and takes the very first job she can find
   • She answers a newspaper notice placed by a doctor’s wife in the city
   • She is married off young to a farmer and moves with him into town
   • Correct answer: She is rescued by an agent, reared by the state, sent out at fifteen

   The poem traces her path in a few lines: a girl “so hemmed round / with disease or murder / that she’ll be rescued by an / agent— / reared by the state and / sent out at fifteen to work in / some hard pressed / house in the suburbs—”. She is a ward of the state, sent to work for a family as a hired girl. The house belongs to “some doctor’s family”, and she is “some Elsie”: the word some suggests one of many girls like her.

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5. 5

   Question 5. Elsie is described as “expressing with broken / brain the truth about us—”. Which reading of this line fits the poem best?

   • She is the cleverest person in the house and lectures the family daily
   • Correct answer: Her damaged, neglected life shows what the whole society has become
   • She reports to the state agent everything the doctor’s family does
   • She keeps a secret diary that exposes the family’s private quarrels

   Elsie cannot explain anything in words — the poem calls her brain broken — yet her life itself expresses “the truth about us”. A reading many share: the neglect and emptiness that shaped her are not hers alone; they show what the whole country, comfortable households included, has become. Williams was a doctor himself, so some doctor’s family can be read as pointing close to home.

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6. 6

   Question 6. In the lines “to be tricked out that night / with gauds”, what does gauds mean?

   • Plain, sturdy work clothes worn for heavy daily labor
   • Sharp prods or sticks used for driving farm animals
   • Correct answer: Showy, cheap ornaments or trinkets worn to look grand
   • Polite manners and graces learned in a finer household

   Gauds are showy, cheap ornaments or trinkets; the word gaudy comes from gaud. To be tricked out with gauds is to be dressed up in flashy finery. The poem sets this cheap show against the missing peasant traditions that might have given the young people real character. (A goad, which sounds similar, is a prod for driving cattle — a different word.)

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7. 7

   Question 7. Before Elsie appears, the poem talks about other people as they. What shift comes after “the truth about us—”?

   • The speaker switches to I and tells the story of his own childhood
   • The speaker turns to Elsie, calling her you, and offers her his advice
   • The speaker drops people and lists only plants, animals and places
   • Correct answer: The speaker turns to we and our, placing himself in the same picture

   This is the poem’s turn. After describing others, it suddenly says “as if the earth under our feet / were / an excrement of some sky / and we degraded prisoners / destined / to hunger until we eat filth”, and later, “it seems to destroy us”. The speaker no longer stands outside looking down: he and his readers are part of the same sick picture. The poem never uses I or you.

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8. 8

   Question 8. “while the imagination strains / after deer / going by fields of goldenrod in / the stifling heat of September / Somehow / it seems to destroy us”. What does this passage most likely suggest?

   • Correct answer: The imagination reaches for beauty it cannot grasp, and that wears us down
   • The speaker goes hunting deer each September and suffers from the heat
   • The goldenrod gives people hay fever, which is why September destroys us
   • The imagination easily rescues us, carrying us away to a cool and quiet place

   The imagination strains — it reaches hard — after a lovely, wild image: deer going by fields of goldenrod. But the heat is stifling, and the speaker says “it seems to destroy us”. Many readers take this as the imagination failing: it longs for something beautiful and real, yet cannot reach it, and the effort itself leaves people worse off. Nothing in the poem says the speaker hunts, and the imagination clearly does not rescue anyone.

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9. 9

   Question 9. What does the line “It is only in isolate flecks that / something / is given off” suggest?

   • That a factory chimney nearby gives off sparks and smoke
   • Correct answer: That meaning or beauty breaks through only in rare, scattered bits
   • That the girl gives off a strong smell of cheap perfume
   • That the lakes of Jersey give off mist in the morning

   After the bleak picture of degraded prisoners and an imagination that cannot reach its goal, the poem allows only a little light: “It is only in isolate flecks that / something / is given off”. The something is never named, which is part of the point — moments of meaning or beauty still appear, but only in rare, scattered specks, never as a whole way of life. This is a reading; the poem does not say what the something is.

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10. 10

    Question 10. The poem ends “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car”. Which reading fits the ending best?

    • A real car accident the speaker once saw on the road out to the suburbs
    • Elsie learning to drive so that she can finally leave the doctor’s house
    • Correct answer: A country speeding ahead with nobody watching over it or steering it
    • The doctor’s family selling its car because it can no longer afford one

    The car is the poem’s last image, and many readers take it as a picture of the whole country: modern America moving fast, with no one to witness and adjust, no one in control. The poem even ends without a period, as if the car is still rolling. Nothing in the poem describes an accident, Elsie driving, or a car being sold.

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11. 11

    Question 11. How is “To Elsie” built on the page?

    • Rhymed four-line stanzas with a steady, regular beat from start to end
    • One long block of prose with no line breaks at all, set out like a letter
    • Fourteen rhymed lines that follow the pattern of a traditional sonnet
    • Correct answer: Unrhymed three-line stanzas, with sentences running past the breaks

    The poem has 66 lines in 22 three-line stanzas, with no rhyme and no regular beat: it is free verse. Long sentences run on across lines and even across stanzas, and many lines break in the middle of a phrase, as in “addressed to cheap / jewelry”. Running a sentence past the end of a line this way is called enjambment. It slows the reader down and makes each word land on its own.

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12. 12

    Question 12. Did it happen? Review these statements about the poem and mark each one.

    • The poem names Kentucky as home to mountain folk.

      Happened

      Right after the opening claim, the poem names “mountain folk from Kentucky” as one of its examples.

    • The girl is sent to work in a grand house in the middle of a city.

      Didn't happen

      She is sent to “some hard pressed / house in the suburbs” — a struggling household outside the city, not a grand one.

    • The girl is sent out to work at the age of fifteen.

      Happened

      The poem says she is “reared by the state and / sent out at fifteen to work in / some hard pressed / house in the suburbs”.

    • The imagination strains after deer on a cool spring morning.

      Didn't happen

      The deer go by “fields of goldenrod in / the stifling heat of September” — late summer heat, not a cool spring morning.

    • The poem says the young people’s imaginations have no peasant traditions to give them character.

      Happened

      The poem speaks of “imaginations which have no / peasant traditions to give them / character”.

    • In the last line, a driver finally takes control of the car.

      Didn't happen

      The poem ends with the opposite: “no one to drive the car”.

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13. 13

    Question 13. The poem uses the unusual word “isolate” twice. Which two things does it describe?

    • Correct answer: The lakes of north Jersey, and the flecks in which something is given off
    • The mountain folk of Kentucky, and the girl sent out at fifteen to work
    • The hedge of choke-cherry, and the fields of goldenrod in September
    • The rich young men with fine eyes, and the doctor’s family in town

    Here isolate is used as an adjective meaning isolated: set apart, alone. It describes the north Jersey country “with its isolate lakes and / valleys”, and returns near the end: “It is only in isolate flecks that / something / is given off”. The repeated word ties the lonely, cut-off places at the start to the rare, scattered moments of meaning at the close.

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