Anyone who has sat through an exam knows the rhythm of its questions: the confident opening, the gradual tightening, the final "last question" that is supposed to separate the serious from the merely prepared. Rolfe Humphries borrows that whole apparatus in "Test Paper" and then uses it to corner the reader. The poem looks like a quiz about what a society values, but it works as a trap, and the trap closes in the last line.
The structure is a descent. The first stanza asks what "we" praise and answers with the safest, most greeting-card answers available: sunsets, open fires, America, mother love, "the merry laughter of a little child." The hedge in "I guess" already sounds a little bored, as if the speaker is reciting an approved list. The second stanza asks what we "really" praise, and the answers turn sharper and more satirical: "Life and Time, / (With capitals)," the books "that Fadiman commends," "chromium bars," "streamlined cars and trains." Those parentheses are doing quiet damage. The capital letters are audible only on the page, a way of mocking people who say "Life" and "Time" as though they were gods. The mention of Fadiman, a name from the book-recommending world of the poem's era, pokes at borrowed taste: we praise what we have been told is worth praising. Likewise the music "played for music's newest friends" suggests culture consumed as fashion.
Then the poem lifts, apparently, into the sublime. "High art, / God's majesty and sacraments and grace, / The universal music of the spheres, / The mysteries of interstellar space." The diction swells to match, with its stacked abstractions and its old idea of cosmic harmony. But the speaker does not stay up there. "Come down to earth" is one of the poem's pivots, an instruction as brisk as a teacher's. The fourth stanza turns intimate, addressing a lover ("My love") and asking what the two of them "deep in our heart of hearts, adore, / Cherish, and tend?" The expected answer, "Each other," arrives and is immediately rejected: "Not so fast. / Maybe, a little; but ourselves much more." The lurch from tender to blunt is where the poem's real argument surfaces. Even love, the most flattering answer, is exposed as a cover story for self-regard.
Formally, Humphries keeps one foot in tradition. The lines are largely iambic pentameter, and the rhyme scheme in the opening stanzas is loose but audible: "fires" and "child," "guess" and "tenderness," then "commends" and "friends," "trains" and a slant echo in the final word. The smoothness is deliberate. It mimics the comfortable, singsong quality of the clichés being listed, so that the meter itself sounds complacent. When the speaker turns on his listener, the rhythm breaks into short, clipped phrases: "Not so fast." "Maybe, a little."
The ending is the poem's boldest move. "Last question. (On your honor.)" is a schoolroom aside, a promise of trust that makes the trap more intimate. We are asked what everyone praises "absolutely, in this day and age," and then told to "Re-read the question; answer thoughtfully; / Write nothing on this portion of the page." The poem withholds its own answer. Yet the logic of the preceding stanzas practically writes it for us: if even love shrinks to self-love, the thing all praise is surely the self. Humphries trusts the reader to reach that conclusion silently, which is far more damning than stating it. The blank space becomes the poem's final image, an empty answer box that the reader fills in mentally and is therefore implicated by.
What makes the poem significant is this method. A direct sermon against vanity would be easy to nod along to and forget. By turning the reader into a test-taker, Humphries makes the indictment participatory: you cannot finish the poem without answering it, and any honest answer is an admission. It is satire that wears the plain clothes of a worksheet, and that is exactly why it stings.