Free Anastasia Has the Answers by Lois Lowry Page A

Ewing looked even
more
startled. She turned, in her desk, toward the back of the room.
    "Vould you stand, please?" the man asked.
    Emily Ewing stood.
    "Tell us, please, vhy you tink dis poet repeated dat last line. Am I correct, no odder lines are repeated in dis poem?"
    "Yessir, that's right," Emily said.
    The man waited for her to respond to his question. Emily looked panic-stricken. The six educators all had their little notebooks and their pens poised.
    Mr. Rafferty looked suddenly pale. His mouth formed a wan and sickly smile. "Emily?" he said.
    "Well, ah, I guess Frost repeated that last line because all the other stanzas had four lines each, and if he hadn't said that line twice, then there would only have been three lines in that last..." Her voice trailed off uncertainly.
    "But don't you see," the man went on, "dat makes for a different rhyme pattern in dat final stanza? Vhy vould he do dat? Maybe—" the man gave an odd little chuckle "—he vas a stupid poet?"
    "Oh, no, I don't think so," Emily said miserably. "But I don't know why he did that with the last stanza."
    "Tank you," the man said. He looked at his colleagues. They all nodded. They all made notes in their notebooks. Emily sat down.
    Call on me, call on me, call on me, Anastasia ESPed to Mr. Rafferty. She could see that he was looking around the room, trying to decided whom to call on next. I know my whole poem perfectly, she tried to signal to him telepathically, and I can answer any question they ask me. I
know
I can.
    But Mr. Rafferty called on Jacob Berman, the biggest wimp in the class.
    Jacob shuffled to the front of the room, stood there with his miserable posture, adjusted his glasses, took a deep breath, and said in his sing song voice:
"
The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair...
"
    The visiting educators all smiled with satisfaction and nodded, recognizing the poem. Anastasia groaned inwardly, recognizing it also, because it was the longest one that anyone had been assigned. Jacob Berman was noted throughout the seventh grade for two things: his disgusting habit of picking his nose and his phenomenal memory. Anastasia was quite certain that Mr. Rafferty had called on Jacob simply because he
knew
that Jacob wouldn't forget a line of that endless poem.
    Rats. Jacob droned on and on and Anastasia glanced at the clock. They'd never have time to get through the entire class. She hoped she would be next.
    "'Ah, love, let us be true to one another!'" Jacob intoned. The class snickered. Jacob Berman saying "Ah, love, let us be true to one another!" was the most ridiculous thing
ever,
and if all those European guests hadn't been in the back of the room, the students would have fallen out of their desks, laughing.
    Finally he was finished. Now me, thought Anastasia. Now me.
    But one of the women, a gray-haired lady in a flowered silk dress, said, "Mr. Berman is it?"
    Jacob nodded awkwardly.
    "An admirable presentation. But let us look now at the reference to Sophocles in stanza two," the woman said in a clipped, no-nonsense British accent. "Let's consider why Matthew Arnold might have used that reference."
    Anastasia could see Mr. Rafferty tense up and then relax as Jacob started in on one of the thoroughly boring explanations that he drew from his incredible memory.
    "Well, Sophocles was a Greek dramatist, of course; I think there are seven great tragedies attributed to him in the fourth century B.C. ," Jacob began. "So he was no stranger to human misery—which of course Arnold refers to a few lines further along." Anastasia could see the educators scribbling furiously in their little notebooks.
    The heck with human misery, Anastasia thought. How about human
joy?
How about "O world! I cannot hold thee close enough"?
    "—and if you compare Sophocles'
Antigone,
" Jacob was saying, "you'll find a surprising similarity of language, especially in line six of the Arnold poem..."
    Mr. Rafferty was beaming and beaming and beaming. The