33 pages • 1 hour read
Ted KooserAbandoned Farmhouse
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Reading Comprehension Answers
1. B. The poem is one of observations, in which the items of the house (the shoes, the fields, the bedroom wall) offer details and clues about the house’s inhabitants.
2. D. Based on the details shared by the items in and around the house, the family was poor (indicated by the preserved food) and isolated (indicated by the narrow country road), and they left in a hurry (indicated by the toys strewn across the yard).
3. A. The poem carries a tone of mystery (“Something went wrong here,” Line 17) and melancholy. The farmhouse is abandoned and the objects are left to ruin.
4. C. The poem is built on the mystery of what occurred, leaving the reader to spin stories or formulate a theory. In reality, the reader can’t know everything and the poem ends with the mystery unsolved.
Related Titles
By Ted Kooser
