First Lines: Name the Poet

Last issue it was novel time, this issue we celebrate poetry! We have amassed ten first lines from our favorite poems. Name the poet, and you've got it! And if you know the name of the poem, all the better. But get the poet and we'll count your answer as correct!

1. Shall I compare thee to a Summer's Day?

2. I think that I shall never see a poem
   A poem lovely as a tree

3. The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
   The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
   The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
   And the highwayman come riding – riding – riding

4. Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,

5. Whose woods these are I think I know.

6. When you are old and gray and full of sleep

7. The only news I know
   Is bulletins all day
   From immortality

8. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,

9. Grow old along with me!
   The best is yet to be,

10. Half a league, half a league,
    Half a league onward,

Submit your answers in an email, and make sure to include your name, address, and country in your entry. Send your answers to:  puzzles@writer-on-line.com

The winner will receive $25 of writing software and his or her name published in our next issue of Writer Online.

DEADLINE: midnight, Thursday, March 31, 2005

Answers to the First Lines Puzzle In Our 03/08/05 Issue

And our winner of last issue's First Lines Puzzle is Meryl Evans of Plano, TX USA.

CONGRATULATIONS Meryl!!!!

You will be receiving DreamPack, a $25 value of writer's software!

Here are the given sentences and correct answers (following) from the First Lines Puzzle:

1. "Call me Ishmael"
Herman Melville, Moby Dick

2. "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
George Orwell, 1984

3. "It was Wang Lung’s marriage day."
Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

4. "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

5. "It was a dark and stormy night."
Edward Bulwer-Litton, Paul Clifford

6. "They’re out there."
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

7. "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…"
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

8. "A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories."
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

9. "The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon."
William Golding, Lord of the Flies

10. "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter."
Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn