Every poem here is printed in full with numbered lines (the modern American poems in the US only), then explained: who is speaking and to whom, the form and sound, what each part does, where the poem turns, and the devices that carry its meaning. Each ends with a practice prompt in the style of the exam. See also the AP Literature study station.
Public-domain poems from the free-response section of the AP English Literature exam. Each page says which exam, and whether College Board has released it.
As the days shorten, a speaker watches summer, flowers and songbirds fade, then orders the door shut and asks for candlelight, stories and the poetry of spring.
A hot London morning told through its noise: a chimney-boy, a dustman, street sellers, shop workers and a porter at work, and a poor poet waking to write.
Twelve rhyming stanzas follow summer from its first fierce heat through night songs and noon labor to ripe orchards and the golden grain of harvest.
A speaker who loves to lie on the bare rocks of empty moorland finds in their silence a shelter from a busy, hurtful world.
A speaker hails a lone star at dusk, compares their own spirit to its steady light, and ends by praising the greatness of being alone.
Widely taught poems of the kind the exam draws on, from Shakespeare to the nineteenth century.
About to leave on a journey, a speaker forbids tears and argues that true love survives absence, like gold beaten thin or the two feet of a compass.
A man remembers the girl he loved as a child in a kingdom by the sea, blames jealous angels for her death, and lies beside her tomb at night.
The speaker tells Death not to be proud, argues point by point that it has no real power, and ends by declaring that Death itself will die.
On a calm night by the sea at Dover, a speaker hears in the waves the retreat of religious faith and turns to a loved one for comfort.
A speaker answers “How do I love thee?” by counting the ways: with her whole soul, in everyday needs, with old grief and childhood faith, and even after death.
Kubla Khan orders a pleasure-dome built beside a wild sacred river; then the poet steps in, wishing he could revive a lost song and build that dome from music.
A walk through chartered London in sixteen lines, where every face carries a mark of sorrow and every cry the speaker hears points back at Church, Palace or marriage.
A duke shows a visitor his late wife’s portrait and, while talking of art and a new marriage, reveals a jealous pride that may have ended her life.
A sailor cries out to his captain as their ship reaches port in triumph, but the captain lies dead on the deck: Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln.
A speaker questions the scenes on an ancient Greek urn, envies its lovers who never age, and hears the urn’s famous message about beauty and truth.
Listening to a nightingale at night, Keats longs to escape a world of sickness and grief, flies after the bird in imagination, then is pulled back to himself.
An African-born speaker calls being brought to America a mercy, then reminds Christians that Black people can be refined and join the angels.
A traveller describes a shattered statue in the desert, and the king’s boast carved on its pedestal now points to nothing but empty sand.
Picturing death, the speaker asks a loved one to remember, then turns at line 9: better to forget and smile than to remember and be sad.
The townspeople envy rich, graceful Richard Cory and wish they were him, until one calm summer night he goes home and shoots himself.
The speaker defines true love as something that never changes, not with circumstances and not with time, and bets his whole career as a writer on it.
Shakespeare’s speaker refuses the usual flattering comparisons, admits his mistress is no goddess, and then insists his love is as rare as any praised in false terms.
The speaker asks whether to compare the beloved to a summer’s day, decides summer falls short, and promises that this poem will keep the beloved alive.
Out of luck and envying everyone, the speaker hits bottom, then thinks of the person he loves and would not trade places with a king.
An aging speaker compares growing old to late autumn, twilight and a dying fire, then says that seeing this makes the listener’s love stronger.
A boy sold into chimney-sweeping tells how he comforted a smaller boy with a dream of angels, then went back up the flues on a closing line about duty that the poem never says who believes.
A child asks a lamb who made it, then answers: the maker is called a Lamb himself, and once became a little child.
At midnight a grieving man lets in a raven whose one word, “Nevermore,” answers every hope of forgetting his lost Lenore or seeing her again.
A voice stares at a tiger burning in the dark and asks, question after question, what kind of maker could have built it.
A lover argues that if they had endless time he would court his lady for centuries, but death is coming, so they should seize their pleasure now.
Old King Ulysses, bored at home years after the Trojan War, hands his kingdom to his son and calls his aging crew to sail out one last time.
A speaker who talks for a whole group describes the smiling mask they wear to hide deep pain from the watching world, in a strict French form.
Keats’s speaker fears dying before he can write his great poems or enjoy love, then stands alone on the shore of the world and lets both sink away.
Worn out by a lecture full of charts and proofs, the speaker slips outside into the night and looks up at the stars in silence.
Twentieth-century poems that are in the public domain everywhere, printed in full for every reader.
Someone sets a plain jar on a hill in Tennessee, and the wild landscape seems to arrange itself around it, though the jar is gray, bare and lifeless.
A World War I soldier describes a gas attack and the dying man he still sees in his dreams, then calls a famous patriotic saying a lie.
A speaker admits to burning the candle at both ends, knows it will not last the night, and tells friends and foes alike that it gives a lovely light.
Hopkins says the world is charged with God’s glory, asks why people trample it with work and trade, and answers that nature still renews itself every morning.
Cornered and outnumbered, a speaker urges his kinsmen to die fighting rather than be hunted like animals, in a sonnet published during the violence of 1919.
An eight-year-old smiles at a boy in Baltimore, gets a racial slur in return, and forgets everything else about months in the city.
A woman in a stiff brocade gown paces a formal garden the day she learns her fiancé died in battle, and asks what patterns are for.
Hopkins thanks God for everything spotted, streaked and patchy, from trout and finches to ploughed fields and tradesmen’s tools, then praises the unchanging God who made them.
Two tired, merry companions ride a ferry back and forth all night, watch the sunrise, and give a woman in a shawl their fruit and nearly all their money.
An old man leaves a land made for the young, sails to holy Byzantium, and asks to shed his dying body and become a golden singing bird.
On a bleak winter evening at the end of the nineteenth century, a speaker hears an old, frail thrush burst into joyful song and wonders what hope it knows.
In a house where a woman lies dead, a voice orders ice cream, flowers and a sheet for her face: the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Yeats pictures a world where things fall apart, then has a vision of a pitiless desert creature, a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.
Thirteen short numbered snapshots each set a blackbird in a different scene or mood, from an eye moving among snowy mountains to a bird sitting still at dusk.
Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams and Jean Toomer. Published before 1931, these are in the public domain in the United States, where each page prints the whole poem; elsewhere the page explains the poem without reprinting it.
As a farm workday ends, a buzz saw takes a boy’s hand. Within a few lines he is dead, and the others go back to their lives.
A lone speaker walks a city at night, avoids every human contact and looks up at a clock that gives no answer, in a sonnet built from terza rima.
At the end of a long harvest, a worn-out apple picker drifts toward sleep, still feeling the ladder sway, and wonders what kind of sleep is coming.
Seeing birches bent low, a speaker sets aside the true cause, ice storms, to imagine a boy swinging on them, and dreams of climbing toward heaven and coming back.
Sandburg admits Chicago is wicked, crooked and brutal, then dares its critics to name a city more alive, and ends with the city laughing like a young worker.
A speaker dreams of dancing freely in the sun and resting at evening as night falls, dark like him, then sings the dream again with small, telling changes.
Will the world end in fire or in ice? In nine wry lines, Frost’s speaker weighs the two and links them to desire and hate.
Sandburg pictures fog as a cat that creeps in on quiet feet, sits watching over the harbor and the city for a while, and then leaves.
On the stairs of their house, a husband and wife who have lost their first child quarrel over how to grieve, and neither can reach the other.
Sent to eat in the kitchen when company comes, the “darker brother” of the American family laughs, grows strong and promises that tomorrow he will sit at the table.
Two neighbors meet each spring to rebuild the stone wall between their land, and the one telling the story keeps wondering why they need it.
A mother tells her son that her life has been no crystal stair, only a hard, broken staircase she keeps climbing, and urges him never to stop.
In eight short lines, Frost watches the first golden color of spring leaves fade and finds the same pattern in Eden, in the dawn and in everything precious.
Black farmworkers sharpen their scythes and start to mow; then a horse-drawn mower cuts a field rat and keeps going, its blade stained with blood.
A Black girl whose lover was lynched in the South asks the white Jesus what prayer is for, and sees love reduced to a shadow on a tree.
On the darkest evening of the year, a traveler pauses with a little horse to watch snow fill a quiet wood, then remembers the promises still to keep.
Hollow men with heads of straw whisper from a dead land, unable to act or even finish a prayer, as the world ends with a whimper.
A timid man leads a mysterious “you” through foggy evening streets toward a tea party and a question he never finds the courage to ask.
One voice speaking for Black people across history remembers four great rivers, from the Euphrates to the Mississippi, and says its soul has grown deep like them.
In sixteen words and no punctuation, Williams sets a rain-wet red wheelbarrow beside white chickens and says that a great deal depends on it.
A traveler at a fork in a yellow wood picks one of two nearly identical roads, then imagines telling the story years later with a sigh.
On Lenox Avenue in Harlem, a narrator hears a Black pianist play and sing the blues late into the night, then go to bed with the song still echoing.