Author: Windows User

The Turtle
By: Mary Oliver
breaks from the blue-black skin of the water, dragging her shell with its mossy scutes across the shallows and through the rushes and over the mudflats, to the uprise, 5 to the yellow sand, to dig with her ungainly feet a nest, and hunker there spewing her white eggs down into the darkness, and you think 10
of her patience, her fortitude, her determination to complete what she was born to do---- and then you realize a greater thing---- she doesn’t consider 15 what she was born to do. She’s only filled with an old blind wish. It isn’t even hers but came to her in the rain or the soft wind 20 which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.
She can’t see herself apart from the rest of the world or the world from what she must do every spring. 25 Crawling up the high hill, luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin, she doesn’t dream she knows she is a part of the pond she lives in, 30 the tall trees are her children, the birds that swim above her
are tied to her by an unbreakable string.

The Turtle
Questions
Literary Device Questions
How many stanzas are there in this poem? ______________
The lines below show an example of which literary device? __________________
“Crawling up the high hill, luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin”
3. The following line, “the tall trees are her children” is an example of which two literary devices? _____________________ & _____________________
4. What is the point-of-view of the poem? ______________________
5. What is the alliteration in line 1? ________________, _______________, _________________
Understanding Questions
6. What is the author referring to when she says about the turtle that this is “what she was born to do----?” _______________________________________________________________________