ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by Asiatic prairies,

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where the buffalos roam in search of wonton soup.

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Yep. Good stuff. Love that wonton soup...

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[ mumbles ]

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All right, you done reading?

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[ mumbles ]

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[ mumbling continues ]

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All right. And... you're done. Whether you like it or not.

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In lines 41 through 45, "composed"

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modifies which word? And here are the potential answers.

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Five-dollar words... Blah, blah, blah...

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And let's just go.

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So, to make this easier, we'll lift the chunk in question out of

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the rest so that we can check it out in isolation.

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Right here.

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Ah, there we go. Okay, so, that's better.

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Wow, these Asiatic prairies sound... relaxing.

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No time for relaxing, though. Gotta focus.

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Uh-huh. Okay, there's the word "composed,"

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which in this case is being used as a verb and is the

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predicate of the sentence. So the question becomes

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who exactly is doing the composing?

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Which noun is the subject that goes along with the verb "compose"?

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It looks like the thing that makes this question a little tricky is the use of the

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following interrupting phrases:

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"the wandering nomads from the distant Asiatic prairies,

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enjoying a free and easy existence as fighters and hunters..."

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Hmm. We're rethinking our dream of being a nomad.

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Fighting and hunting all day sounds, well, kind of stressful.

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Sorry, we're really trying to focus here.

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Since the interrupting phrases are set apart from the rest of the sentence with commas,

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we can ignore them when trying to figure out which noun is the subject.

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The commas signal that we can remove the phrases without changing the basic meaning of the sentence.

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So, listen, we'll prove it.

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Our own ancestors composed songs which

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celebrated the mighty deeds of their greatest leaders and yadda yadda yadda.

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See, it totally makes sense.

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Since we know that no words included in these phrases are crucial to the sentence,

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we can cross out choice A - existence, C - prairies,

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and D - fighters. We're looking for the subject,

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and we can never remove a subject from a sentence without

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causing the whole darn thing to collapse.

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With those rude interrupting phrases out of the way, it's now clear that

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the noun "ancestors"

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is the subject that goes with the verb "composed."

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This makes choice B the right answer. Like ancestors composed.

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Yeah. It's sort of amazing they had any time for poetry with

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all the fighting and hunting and nomad-ing that they were doing. Yeah.

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