Literary Criticism Past Papers
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Q. Critically evaluate any ONE of the following:
(2008 Annual)
(i) Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night
To be cut down by the sharp axe of light,
Out of the night, two cocks together crow,
Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow;
And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand,
Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,
Each facing each as in a coat of arms;
The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.
From Cock Crow by Edward Thomas
(ii) My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.
Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart of lighten.
From Fosterling by Seamus Heaney
(2009 Annual)
(i) Twelve o' clock
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memoryAnd all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium
(T.S. Eliot: Rhapsody on a Windy Night)
(ii) Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge
Even on a hot afternoon
One sees many joggers.
And there is the view, of course
Looking across the water
I think of those people from Vietnam.
The mothers, the fathers,
What they would'not have given,
What they would still give
Their blood, their hair, their livers, their kidneys,
Their lunges, their fingers, their thumbs
To get their children
Past the Statue of Liberty
(Anonymous)
(2010 Annual)
(i) I am not one who much or oft delight
To season of my fireside with personal talk,
Of friends who live within an easy walk,
Or neighbours, daily, weekly in my sight:
And for my chance acquaintance ladies bright,Sons, mothers, maidens withering on the stalk,
These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalk
Painted on rich men's floor, for one feast night.
(From Wordsworth's Personal Talk)
(ii) I say him leap and thwack you with
Inherited expertise. I
Saw you still the pole and work your
Son to the ground. A dying art
Bridged two generations. You thought.
Now we come for formalities
But you talk of poetry and how
Meaningful some verses become
When the young die and old men live.
(Athar Tahir - Subtraction II)
(2011 Annual)
(i) What is Freedom? --- Ye can tell
That which Slavery is too well,
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
'Tis to work, and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In you limbs, as in a cell,
For the tyrants' use to dwell
So ye for them are made
Loom and plough, and sword and spadeWith or without your own will bent
To their defense and nourishment.
(From: The Mask of Anarchy by Shelly)
(ii) They're lying; lying all of them:
He never loved his shadow,
And tried to wring its neck.
Not love but murder on his mind,
He grappled with the other man
Inside the lucid stream
Only the surface broke,
Unblinking eyes
Came swimming back in view.
At last he knew
He never would
Destroy the other self
And knowing made him shrink
He shrank into a yellow --- bellied flower
(Narcissus by Mervyn Morris)
(2012 Annual)
"MISERRUMUS,' and neither name nor date,
Prayer, text, or symbol, graven upon the stone,
Nought but that word assigned to the unknown,
That solitary word-to-separate
From all, and cast a cloud around the fate
Of him who lies beneath. Most wretched one,
'Who' chose his epitaph?--- Himself alone
Could thus have dared the grave to agitate,
And claim, among the dead, this awful crown;"Nor doubt that He marked also for his own
Close to these cloistral steps a burial place,
The every foot might fall with heavier tread,
Trampling upon his vileness. Stranger, pass
Softly! To save the contrite, Jesus bled
(William Wordsworth)
(ii) BRIGHT star! Would I were steadfast as thou art ---
Not in love splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors ---
No --- yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever --- or else swoon to death.
(John Keats)
(2013 Annual)
(i) Full fathom five my father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those were pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell;
Burthen: Ding, Dong.
Hark, now I hear them --- ding-dong bell.(Shakespeare)
(ii) A poor bird freely roaming in the jungle
He might not have been affected by these hindrance
On whose decoration the nature is decorated
His world might be innocent".
(Sarala Bista)
(2014 Annual)
(i) Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Easter tide.
Now, of my three score years and ten
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy Springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more,
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
(A.E. Houseman)
(ii) The silver swan, who living had not note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat,
Leaning her breast against the ready shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
Farewell all joys! O death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now love, more fools than wise.
(Anonymous)(2015 Annual)
(i) I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,
Stand in the desert ... near them, on the sand
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal those words appear;
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sand stretch far away.
(P.B. Shelley)
(ii) I have finished my combat with the sun,
And my body, the old animal, knows nothing more.
The power seasons bred and killed,
And where themselves the genii
Of their own ends.
Oh, but the very self of the storm
Of sun and slaves, breeding and death,
The old animal.
(Wallace Stevens)(2016 Annual)
a. I will drain
Long draughts of quiet As a purgative:
Remember Twice daily Who I am;
Will lie o' nights
In the bony arms
Of Reality and be comforted.
(Elizabeth Swell)
b. I was angry with my friend
1 told my wrath, my wrath did end.
was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears
And I sunned it with smiles
And soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
(William Blake)
(2016 Supply)
(a) How can I, that girl standing there, May attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And may be what they say is true
Of wars and warm's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And hold her in my arms!
(W.B. Yeats)
(b) The silver swan, who living had no note.
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat,
Leaning her breast against the redy shore,Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
Farewell all joys! O death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.
(2017 Annual)
[Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean]
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
I ears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half awakened birds
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.OR
Some Trees
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness we are surrounded:
A silence already Mad with noises,
A can was on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
placed in a puzzling light, and moving,Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
(2018 Annual)
LOVE- AN ESSENCE OF ALL RELIGIONS
Through love thorns become roses, and
Through love vinegar becomes sweet wine,
Through love the stake becomes a throne,
Through love misfortunes become good fortunes,
Through love burning fire becomes pleasing light,
Through love stone becomes soft as butter,
Through love grief becomes a joy,
Through love lions become harmless,
Through love sickness becomes health,
Through love wrath seems to be a mercy,
Through love the dead rise to life, through love the king becomes-a slave.
(Jalaluddin Rumi)
OR
A man of words and not of deeds,
Is like a garden full of weeds.
And when the weeds begin to growIt's like a garden full of snow.
And when the snow begins to fall,
It's like a bird upon the wall.
And when the bird away does fly,
It's like an eagle in the sky.
And when the sky begin to roar
It's like a lion at the door.
And when the door begins to crack,
It's like a stick across your back.
And when your back begins to smart,
It's like a penknife in your heart.
And when your heart begins to bleed,
You're dead and dead and dead indeed,
(Charles Perrault)(2018 Supply)
a.
These two by the stone wall
Are a slight part of death.
The grass is still green.
But there is a total death,
A devastation, a death of great height
And depth, covering all surfaces,
Filling the mind.
These are the small townsmen of death,
A man and a woman, like two leaves
That keep clinging to a tree,
Before winter freezes and grows black -
Of great height and depth
Without any feeling, an imperium of quiet,
In which a wasted figure, with an instrument,
Propounds blank final music.
(Wallace Stevens)b.
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spènt.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
The practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
1 lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
Next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely one. And vaster
Some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love)
I shan't have lied. It's evident
The art of losing's not too hard to master
Though it may look like (write it!) like disaster. (Elizabeth Bishop)(2019 Annual)
(a) A Sindhi Woman
Bare foot , through the bazaar,
And with the same undulant grace
As the cloth blown back from her face,
She glides with a stone jar,
High on her head
And not a ripple in her tread.
Watching her cross erect
Stones, garbage, excrement and crumbs
Of glass in the Karachi słums,
I, with my stoop, reflect;
They stand most straight
Who learn to walk beneath a weight.
(b) The Feed
Holding a grain of millet in her beak
The mother sparrow has come to feed.
The young ones are so tiny and small
From head to toe they are beaksWhen they cry.
One grain to be fed the ten young ones
To whom the mother sparrow should feed?
Conjuring beak with beak
With whom should she solace?
Fissuring the atom
You have lean to weep and wail in a loud tone,
Splitting the grain,
You have leamt to set life on foot
Could you split the grain?
One grain to be fed to the ten young ones.
(2019 Supply)
Ruba'iyat
Faith is like Abraham at the stake: to be
Self-honoring and God-drunk, is faith. Hear me,
You whom the age's way to captivate !
Music of strange lands with Islam's fire blends,
On which the nation's harmony depends;
Empty of concord is the soul of Europe,Whose civilization to no Makkah bends.
Love's madness has departed: in
The Muslim's veins the blood runs thin;
Ranks broken, hearts perplexed, prayers cold,
No feeling deeper than the skin.
He Came to Know Himse!f
He came to know Himself
Naught else had He in view
To be able to realize this
He got enmeshed in live
He alighted from high heaven
To pour a cascade of love
Became Mansur to mount the gallows
Just to have His head cut off.
He treaded the bazaar of Egypt
Just to be sold for a slave
Sachu speaks the bare truth
To speak of His sorjourn on earth.
SPECIAL THANKS TO MY STUDENT MOMINA
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