Quiz Questions:

White’s “Once More to the Lake” and Field’s “Little Boy Blue” both included a little boy as a major part of the work.  Which setting details were used to describe the boys?  How did the choice of detail change our impressions of these individuals?

In Sandburg’s poem, what are the main details?  How specific are they?  What effect does this have on the tone?

Answering Questions Like This

The most successful answers for these questions included specific details from the works, and then discussed the effects these details had on the reader.  For example, one could say:

"Once More to the Lake" described the boats to illustrate how the landscapes had changed slightly, but that the son is very similar to his father.  We see the boy learning to use the boat's motor with precision just as his father did decades previously, but it's a different type of motor.  This creates the effect of time standing still even as surface details (such as the inboard versus outboard motors) change.

In "Little Boy Blue," the boy himself is hardly described at all.  Instead, we see his youth and innocence in the way he places his toys in their box, in the way his kisses the toy soldier.  As the toys begin to collect dust and rust, we see how the boy's death has frozen time in the sense that he will always remain the same in memory just as the toys remain in the same places, but it's clear from the aging of the toys that the memory of the boy will become more faint with time.

Sandburg's "Last Answers" uses very nonspecific details regarding the gray mist in order to present a forlorn tone.  This could also be seen to represent a kind of loneliness in that hardly any details are exchanged in the conversation between the woman and the narrator.  The most specific images (of skulls and lungs and bones and tissue) may be references to human mortality, and the mention of "dust" soon after these terms may be an allusion to the phrase "ashes to ashes, dust to dust."