Question

Direction: 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.
Which of the following statements BEST interprets the lines “He doesn’t see you as a story, though/He feels you as his atmosphere”?

• A. You are larger than life
• B. You are not a narrative of the past
• C. You are haunted by your past
• D. You are an extension of the past
• E. Your present subsumes your past

Answer 1

Answer: (E)

The lines when simplified literally mean that the past doesn’t see the poet and what he is now as a story. Rather, the present is the atmosphere of the past; the past dwells in the present. So, we can say the present subsumes the past.

Hence, E is the correct answer.