Amal College of Advanced Studies, Nilambur

Half Yearly Examination, December 2010

III BA English, Paper IV-Poetry

I. Write an essay on anyone of the following in 250 words: (1x10 = 10)

a) The juxtaposition of the world of experience and the word of imagination in ’Ode to
Nightingale.’
b) “Dover Beach” as a statement of the confusions and conflicts of the Victorian
times.
c) What are the striking features of Gray’s elegy?

II. Write an essay on anyone of the following in 250 words: (1x10 = 10)
a) The attitude of Yeats to the Irish Uprising as visible in ‘Easter 1916’.
b) What are the thoughts that the deserted church evoked in the mind of the speaker?
c) Hardy’s philosophy of life as embodied in ‘The Darkling Thrush’

III. Write an essay on anyone of the following in 250 words: (1x10 = 10)
a) ‘Mending Wall’ is a call for a world without walls. Elaborate with examples.
b) Through “Daddy”, Sylvia Plath commits a brutal act of patricide. Elucidate.
c) What do you think of the statement ‘good fences make good neighbours’?

IV. Annotate the following passages in 50 words: (6x5 = 30)

Section A
a) Ah, Love! Let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams
b) Perhaps in thin neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire.
 Section B

a) All changed, changed utterly,

A terrible beauty is born.
b) A serious home on serious earth it is,
In whose blest air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized and robbed as destinies.
Section C
a) Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
b) He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only only and the shade of trees.

V. Write short notes on any Ten of the following: (10 x 2 = 20)

1. What are charter’d streets?
2. Who is ‘Tithonus’? What happened to him?
3. Who is the Duke speaking to in Browning’s poem? For what purpose?
4. Describe the maiden in ‘The Solitary Reaper.’
5. What did Sophocles hear long ago?
6. How did Hardy describe the thrush?
7. How do you interpret the image of the stone in Yeats’ poem?
8. What is the irony in the title ‘Church Going’?
9. Why does the speaker call the painter ‘Willy’?
10. What does Tennyson share in Tithonus?
11. What does the poet witness in the London Street?
12. The ‘Electra Complex’ manifested in the poem “Daddy”?
13. What is the symbolic significance of wall in “Mending Wall”?
14. How does the daughter verbally assassinate her Daddy?
15. Who will visit the church in the night? What do they come for?