Every poem here is printed in full with numbered lines, 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A voice stares at a tiger burning in the dark and asks, question after question, what kind of maker could have built it.
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.