Exam: Speaker and Attitude Question Types

A poem can be about loss, work, or an orchard sale, but the question isn't asking what the poem is about. It's asking how the speaker feels about it. Subject matter is neutral until word choice colors it. Two poems about the same orchard could carry opposite attitudes, so the test keeps returning to attitude because it's the fastest way to check whether you're actually reading tone and not just summarizing plot.

To answer it, look at the verbs, the line breaks, and what the speaker chooses to say last. A speaker who says 'let them measure, the measuring is not the tree' isn't neutral and isn't raging either. The line concedes a fact while quietly refusing to accept what it means, and that mix is the attitude. The answer choices are built the same way every time: one is too extreme, one is too flat or purely factual, one names the wrong emotion entirely, and one matches the precise temperature of the actual diction. Your job is to find the word that matches the poem's restraint or excess exactly, not the word that matches the general subject.

This connects directly to the rest of the passage set, since structure questions, figurative language questions, and the attitude question all draw on the same close reading of diction. When a question restricts you to specific lines, the fence matters: evidence from elsewhere in the poem, however true, can't support your answer. You're reading a smaller poem inside the poem.