Q 01/05

In one Dickinson poem, what creature buzzes between the dying speaker and the light?

A) A fly

B) A bee

C) A wasp

D) A moth

Answer · why

A) A fly

A fly, with its 'blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz'; then 'the windows failed', and 'I could not see to see.'

Q 02/05

About how many poems did Dickinson write?

A) About 60

B) About 180

C) About 1,800

D) About 18,000

Answer · why

C) About 1,800

About 1,800, yet fewer than a dozen of them were published while she was alive.

Q 03/05

Dickinson wrote that to make a prairie takes a clover, one bee and what?

A) Revery

B) Sunlight

C) Rain

D) Patience

Answer · why

A) Revery

Revery, and she adds that 'The revery alone will do, If bees are few.'

Q 04/05

Who discovered Dickinson's poems in her desk after her death?

A) Her mother Emily

B) Her younger sister Lavinia

C) Her niece Martha

D) Her friend Helen Hunt Jackson

Answer · why

B) Her younger sister Lavinia

Her younger sister Lavinia then spent years urging editors and publishers to print them, and a first selection appeared in 1890.

Q 05/05

In Dickinson's 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain', mourners creak across the soul in boots of what?

A) Lead

B) Iron

C) Stone

D) Clay

Answer · why

A) Lead

Lead; then 'space began to toll' as if all the heavens were a bell, leaving the speaker 'wrecked, solitary, here.'