Question

Read these lines from the poem "Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond" by Galway Kinnell:

In the frog pond
the vapor trail of a SAC bomber creeps,

I hear its drone, drifting, high up
in immaculate ozone.
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Which sentence best describes one effect of the poet's use of imagery in this excerpt?
A. It links two unlike concepts, a frog pond and a bomber, to emphasize the speaker's sensitivity to his surroundings.
B. It helps communicate to the reader the atrocities of war by describing two unrelated things.
C. It compares the solitude of the pond to the noisiness of the bomber to show how soldiers sought refuge from the war.
D. It contrasts war and peace by describing a bomber against the backdrop of a peaceful setting.

Answer 1

"Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond", is a poem written by Galway Kinnell, a Pulitzer Prize winner who dedicated his life not just to writing, but also to actively defending the civil rights during the Vietnam War and opposing said war. One of the characteristics of most of this poet´s poems is the relfection on the inner workings of the human mind and spirit, more than the outward parts. In fact, he himself once said in an interview that he was the poet of the ugly, because he tended to make emphasis more on ugly aspects of life, nature and human beings than beauty or what was standard in poetry. One other characteristic of his poems is that he tended to mention and use topics of nature a lot and combined the human with the animal world to put forth his messages and meaning. In this particular poem, Kinnell explores the happenings in a natural setting and establishes a peaceful mood with the imagery of a pond and its inhabitants to later break that mood with the mention of the appearance of human actions, the SAC bomber´s vapor trail. This is why, for this particular excerpt, the correct response is D: It contrasts war and peace by describing a bomber against the backdrop of a peaceful setting.