AP English Literature Free Response Practice Tests

Question 1 — Poetry Analysis

In Claude McKay’s poem “Flame-Heart,” published in 1922, the speaker, who has been away for ten years from the tropical place where he grew up, tries to recall the seasons and childhood pleasures of the place he left. Read the poem carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how McKay uses literary elements and techniques to convey the speaker’s complex experience of remembering a childhood home that is partly lost to him.

• Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents a defensible interpretation.
• Select and use evidence to support your line of reasoning.
• Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.
• Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.

Flame-Heart

So much have I forgotten in ten years,
So much in ten brief years! I have forgot
What time the purple apples come to juice,
And what month brings the shy forget-me-not.
⁵ I have forgot the special, startling season
Of the pimento’s flowering and fruiting;
What time of year the ground doves brown the fields
And fill the noonday with their curious fluting.
I have forgotten much, but still remember
¹⁰ The poinsettia’s red, blood-red in warm December.

I still recall the honey-fever grass,
But cannot recollect the high days when
We rooted them out of the ping-wing path
To stop the mad bees in the rabbit pen.
¹⁵ I often try to think in what sweet month
The languid painted ladies used to dapple
The yellow by-road mazing from the main,
Sweet with the golden threads of the rose-apple.
I have forgotten—strange—but quite remember
²⁰ The poinsettia’s red, blood-red in warm December.

What weeks, what months, what time of the mild year
We cheated school to have our fling at tops?
What days our wine-thrilled bodies pulsed with joy
Feasting upon blackberries in the copse?
²⁵ Oh some I know! I have embalmed the days,
Even the sacred moments when we played,
All innocent of passion, uncorrupt,
At noon and evening in the flame-heart’s shade.
We were so happy, happy, I remember,
³⁰ Beneath the poinsettia’s red in warm December.

Question 2 — Prose Fiction Analysis

The following excerpt is from The Weather Side, a 2019 novel by Clare Dunstan, a fictional writer created for this 7ESL practice test. In this passage, the narrator, a sixteen-year-old girl, helps her father, a commercial fisherman, scrape and repaint the family’s fishing boat before he sells it. Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Dunstan uses literary elements and techniques to portray the complex character of the narrator’s father.

• Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents a defensible interpretation.
• Select and use evidence to support your line of reasoning.
• Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.
• Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.

from The Weather Side

¹ My father believed that a boat should leave you the way it came to you, which was clean. He said this on the first Saturday in April, standing in the boatyard with a scraper in one hand, as if it were a law of physics rather than something he had just made up. The Ruth Ellen sat on her cradle above us, her hull streaked with rust and green scum, her name half gone at the stern. A man from Portsmouth was coming in two weeks to look at her. “Nobody buys a boat that looks sorry for itself,” my father said, and handed me the scraper.

² So we scraped. We scraped for three weekends, down through the white, down through a layer of blue I had never seen, down to a gray primer that my father said was older than me. He worked the way he did everything, in silence broken by instructions. Not like that. Flatter. Let the tool do it. When I gouged the planking he did not yell; he only set his hand over mine and pushed, and the paint came away in one long curl, and then he took his hand back and put it in his pocket as though it had done something without asking him.

³ I was sixteen and I had opinions. I told him the Portsmouth man would repaint her anyway, that people who bought boats liked to make them their own. I told him it was stupid to spend forty dollars a gallon for somebody else. He listened to all of it, nodding, sanding the curve of the bow. “You’re probably right,” he said, and kept sanding.

⁴ He had fished her for twenty-two years. He had fished her through the bad seasons after the quotas, through the winter my mother moved to Albany, through the autumn he broke two fingers in the winch and taped them together and went out anyway. He never talked about any of it. What he talked about was the weather, and the Red Sox, and whether the Portsmouth man would try to knock him down on the price. “He’ll find something,” he said. “They always find something.” Then he went over the keel again with his palm, feeling for anything the man might find.

⁵ On the last Sunday we painted. The enamel went on thick and bright, and the smell of it filled my head until the whole yard seemed to float. My father cut in along the waterline with a brush no wider than his thumb, holding his breath on the long strokes. For a while the only sounds were the gulls and the small wet kiss of the brush. When he finished the port side, he stepped back, and I watched his face do something I did not have a name for then. It was the look of a man admiring a thing and saying goodbye to it in the same breath, and not wanting either one to show.

⁶ “She came up nice,” I said.

⁷ “She was always nice,” he said. “She just needed somebody to notice.”

⁸ The name was last. He had bought a stencil kit, but when I opened it he shook his head and took out a jar of black paint and the thin sable brush that used to live in the kitchen drawer, the one my mother had used for her birthday cards. He painted the letters freehand, one at a time, R and u and t and h, his tongue at the corner of his mouth like a boy’s. It took him most of an hour. When he got to Ellen his hand stopped above the hull for so long that I thought something was wrong with him.

⁹ “You want me to do it?” I asked.

¹⁰ “No,” he said. “I’ve got it.” And he did it, every letter, straighter than the stencil could have made them.

¹¹ Afterward we sat on overturned buckets and looked at her. The sun was low and the new white took the color of it, so that the whole hull glowed a pale orange, like something lit from inside. My father wiped the brush on a rag, over and over, long after it was clean.

¹² “He’ll probably change the name,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. I think I wanted him to be angry, so that one of us would be.

¹³ My father considered this. He folded the rag into a square and then into a smaller square. “That’s his right,” he said. “It’ll be his boat.” He stood, and his knees cracked, and he put a hand on the hull, flat, the way you would on the shoulder of someone taller than you. “But she’ll know,” he said, and went to get the truck.

Question 3 — Literary Argument

Many works of literature feature characters who are torn between what they owe their families and what they owe themselves. The expectations of parents, siblings, or a family’s traditions may pull against a character’s own desires, convictions, or sense of identity, and the choice the character makes—or refuses to make—can reveal a great deal about the values at stake in the work.

Either from your own reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction in which a character must choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to self. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the character’s choice contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

• Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents a defensible interpretation.
• Provide evidence to support your line of reasoning.
• Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.
• Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.

Suggested works: All My Sons, Americanah, Antigone, The Awakening, Beloved, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Brothers Karamazov, Brown Girl, Brownstones, Ceremony, The Color Purple, Death of a Salesman, East of Eden, Everything I Never Told You, Fences, The Glass Menagerie, The God of Small Things, The Grapes of Wrath, Great Expectations, Hamlet, Homegoing, House Made of Dawn, Jane Eyre, The Joy Luck Club, King Lear, The Kite Runner, Little Fires Everywhere, Little Women, Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Mill on the Floss, The Namesake, Pachinko, The Poisonwood Bible, Pride and Prejudice, Purple Hibiscus, A Raisin in the Sun, The Remains of the Day, Romeo and Juliet, The Round House, Salvage the Bones, Song of Solomon, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Things Fall Apart, Washington Square.