Choice
c
—“wrath”—is the last thing mentioned
in the first stanza, so it follows that “wrath” is what “it”
refers to.
The second stanza tells us that the speaker
“water’d” it (his wrath) with fears and “sunned” it with
smiles and wiles. How can this be? Can you literally
water and sun your anger? No, but the speaker is not
being literal here. Instead, he is using figurative lan-
guage. Like the similes we saw earlier about Coach
Lerner, comparing his voice to a foghorn and his hair-
cut to that of a drill sergeant, this stanza uses a
metaphor
—a comparison that doesn’t use the words
like
or
as
—to compare the speaker’s wrath to some-
thing that grows with water and sun. Now, given these
clues (and the best clue of all, the title of the poem), to
what exactly is the speaker comparing his wrath?
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