Petit, the Poet Practice Quiz — Spoon River Anthology
by Edgar Lee Masters — tap or click to flip
Practice Quiz: Petit, the Poet
What does "seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick" represent?
Petit's lifeless, mechanical poetry — dried seeds rattling in a dead pod, small and repetitive.
What five French verse forms does Petit write?
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, and ballades — all rigid traditional forms with strict rhyme and repetition.
Who are Homer and Whitman in the poem, and what do they represent?
The ancient Greek epic poet and the American poet of democracy — they represent vast, elemental poetry that engages fully with life, unlike Petit's dry formalism.
What was happening in the village that Petit missed?
"Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, / Courage, constancy, heroism, failure" — the full range of human experience unfolded while he wrote about snows and roses.
What is ironic about Petit's epitaph being in Spoon River Anthology?
Masters wrote the anthology in free verse — the form championed by Whitman — making the book itself an embodiment of what Petit failed to achieve.
What structural device does the poem use?
Circular structure — it begins and ends with "seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick," trapping Petit in his own repetitive patterns even in death.
What is Petit's "same old thought" that he keeps repeating?
"The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished; / And what is love but a rose that fades?" — cliched themes of transience and lost love.