Direction: Read the passages on the following pages (a poem and an excerpt from a play) and answer the multiple-choice questions. Then write the essay described in "Your Task." You may use the margins to take notes as you read and scrape to plan your response.

Your Task:
After you have read the passages and answered the multiple-choice question, write a unified essay about  the loss of gentility  as revealed in the passages. In your essay, use ideas from Both passages to establish a controlling idea about the loss of gentility, use evidence from both passages to develop your controlling idea, and show how each author used specific literary elements or techniques to convey ideas.
Guidelines:
•Use ideas from both passages to establish a controlling idea about the loss of gentility, as revealed in the passages
•Use specific and relevant evidence from both passages to develop your controlling idea
•Show how each author uses specific literary elements (for example, theme, characterization, structure, point of view) or techniques (for example, symbolism, irony, figurative language) to portray the loss of gentility
•Organize your ideas in a logical and coherent manner
•Use language that communicates ideas effectively
•Follow the conventions of standard written English

 Direction: Answer the following questions. The question may help you think about the ideas you might want to use in your essay. You may return to these questions any time you wish. (8-10 questions)

Passage I (the poem)-Questions 1-4 refer to passage I.
 
 Passage II (the excerpt from a play)- Question 5-8 refer to passage II.

After you have finished these questions, review Your Task and the Guidelines and write your response to Part III. You may use scrape paper to plan your response.
Before you write the essay, check the rubrics for Task III on which your essay's grade is based on.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
   No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
   An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
   Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
   Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For ritual pieties,
     White flower-garlanded heifers,
       Libation and sacrifice,
     But there on the shining metal
       Where the altar should have been,
     She saw by his flickering forge-light
       Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
   A crowd of ordinary decent folk
   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
   That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
   And could not hope for help and no help came:
   What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For athletes at their games,
     Men and women in a dance
       Moving their sweet limbs
     Quick, quick, to music,
       But there on the shining shield
     His hands had set no dancing-floor
       But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

     The thin-lipped armorer,
       Hephaestos, hobbled away,
     Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
     At what the god had wrought
       To please her son, the strong
     Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
       Who would not live long.

                                                                                                                                                                    Curtain