Your Final Examination Assignment

For your final examination, I want you to write (that is, type, format with one-inch margins on all sides of the paper, and double-space) a few pages in response to ONE of the following items. Print your essay and turn it in at the end of the period. You MAY talk with each other about your choice. Use your time well. Work to get at least two full pages of thoughtful, well-wrought, well-edited text. Yes, it is a challenge. That IS the point of the exercise.

I.

"Wild Geese"

By

Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


© Mary Oliver, from “American Primitive.”


II.


A man goes to the doctor. He tells the doctor, “I’m at the end of my rope! My brother thinks he’s a chicken! I don’t know what to do!”
The doctor asks, “Why don’t you have him committed?”
The man answers, “I thought about it, but the thing is, I really need the eggs.”
How is this story about what often happens in relationships between two people?


III.

Saint Teresa of Avila is famous, among other things, for having said that “More tears were shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones.” Write about this observation.