From the title I thought the poem would be about taking a college course "pass/fail," where if you have above a C you pass the class and otherwise you would fail. It's almost like taking the "safe" way because you don't know how well you've done.
The poem starts out by saying that we will never complete and achieve our dream of higher education, "blue books." It doesn't matter if you are successful in waking life because when you are asleep your doubts are waiting to haunt you. When you dream, it calls to you with two pencils that are not sharpened, meaning that from the beginning you are not prepared for success, but failure. Then it says that you haven't even taken the class yet. That shows the anticipation of starting something new but not knowing how and what to prepare. The next sentence means that opportunity is not available to you, "the book closes in your face when you reach for it." Everything that is happening is wrong and nothing is going well. When you wake up, you realize its a dream but your doubts still haunt you and you continue to drown in all the things you still need to learn and do. Applying the title now, I think it means that in life you will both fail and pass at the same time by overcoming your fears. You will believe that you have failed, but in actuality you have passed but not as spectacularly as you have hoped, wished, and prepared for. The theme of this poem is to continue to strive and learn because you never stop learning in life which is why at the end of the poem it says that, "you will still smother in all of the feathers that have to be learned by."
This a very thorough and well articulate analysis. Next, try not to refer to the TP-CAST directly.
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