GRADE 12 (HERITAGE OF WORDS: HSEB NEPAL)

GOD’S GRANDEUR

     --Gerard Manley Hopkins

What is the central idea of the poem “God’s Grandeur”? 

“God’s Grandeur” is basically a praise poem dedicated to the magnificence and glory of God in the world. The poem illustrates how the world is filled with God’s creative energy that keeps the world running and gives it its present form, and how humans lack this awareness of God’s power that pervades the world and continue to exploit it by corrupting it with their interest for commerce. Yet, the poem reassures the readers that despite humans’ insensitive treatment of the world, nature is never exhausted and that there is immense “freshness deep down things.” And, despite the apparent dark cloak that hides the world temporarily, the world tears the cloak apart to shine through because of the real and immediate presence of God that oversees everything.

ABOUT LOVE

   --Anton Chekhov

What kinds of love experiences are suggested by Alyohin in “About Love”?  

Alyohin basically speaks of three kinds of love experiences including his love for Anna, which forms the core of the story itself. The first kind of love he refers to is the one between Nikanor the cook and Pelageya, which is filled with violence and is less mutual. The woman loves the not-so-good-looking cook and wants to live with him ‘“just so”’ without marriage despite the cook’s contrary religious conviction. Further, the cook also swears at and beats her when drunk, yet, for a mysterious reason, the woman still seems to love him and does not leave. 

Another kind of love Alyohin speaks of is his own while he was still a student. He recalls how the girl he lived with always expected him to provide for her housekeeping and food. This kind seems to have been motivated by self-interest, and the financial security that Alyohin could provide. Yet, the third kind of love that Alyohin refers to (which is between him and Anna) goes beyond all conventions and all notions of what is honorable or dishonorable about love. This love, although not justifiable on the grounds of social conventions, lasts for a long time, remains unexpressed until it reaches a critical moment in life when it is explicitly reciprocated at the end and yet attains some spiritual height. Although unfulfilled, it is still not motivated by the need to meet the urge of a physical body, and therefore, perhaps the best of all kinds of love Alyohin speaks of. 

How does Alyohin define love?

Actually, Alyohin thinks the ways of love are uncertain and so is personal happiness that comes from being in love. He exemplifies how the beautiful Pelageya falls in love with a not-so-good-looking Nikonar who beats her up. He believes ‘“[love] is a great mystery”’ and everything said about it is not a solution but a statement of questions that remain unanswered. Given this uncertainty, and incapacity to answer the questions surrounding it, one has to look at every such instance of love in its own context or individuality and not generalise wholesale. Love, according to him, is an object to be “poeticized, embellished with roses,” not with “fatal questions.” Further, although he is uncertain about asking oneself, when in love, whether or not it is honorable or dishonorable, stupid or wise, or what its consequences would be, he thinks asking such questions is surely “a hindrance and a source of dissatisfaction and irritation.” He therefore concludes that when one loves, one must start reasoning about love “from what is higher, more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their usual meaning, or [one] must not reason at all.”

GRANDMOTHER

      --Ray Young Bear

What impression of grandmother does the speaker give in the poem Grandmother?  

The speaker in the poem “Grandmother” is a grandson who fondly reminisces his dead grandmother that remained intimate, affectionate and inspirational to him. Besides, he portrays her as an atypical hardwordking Mesquaki member who has had to suffer some cultural adulteration due to its contact with a dominant modern culture. His recognition of her distant “shape,” “warm and damp” hands on his head, and even “a voice coming from a rock” are proof that tell us that the two must have been very intimate and emotionally bonded. It is also suggestive of the grandmother’s immense love towards him. Further, he symbolically describes how her grandmother still lives eternally like a primordial rock, and how “[her grandmother’s] words would flow inside” him as words of inspiration that constantly guide him towards a hopeful future. However, the speaker also sadly and acutely articulates a sense of loss of identity while he describes her grandmother wearing a “purple scarf” and carrying a “plastic shopping bag” that are but alien to the pristine Mesquaki culture.

TRAVELLING THROUGH THE DARK

 --William Stafford

What is the central idea of the poem “Travelling through the Dark”?

The central idea of the poem by Stafford is a conflict between the two worlds: the human and nature, civilization and wilderness, technology and the environment; emotion and reason, and life and death. 

Stafford illustrates grimly and rather uncomfortably a conflict that occurs when the human world intrudes on the natural one: the speaker finds “a dear/ dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.” He explains how modern civilization is threatening pure wilderness, that is, how technology—here, in the forms of cars and the man-made road—is invasive and harmful, and how it disturbs the order in nature. The motorways cost animals their lives and nature its calm wilderness that is polluted by the “exhaust” and disturbed by the engine that “[purs].” The living, unborn “fawn” inside the dead “doe” also forces the speaker to experience an acute sense of pain and guilt, and to reflect on this situation emotionally at first and then with reason, hence making him push the doe over the edge into the river and clear the route again for the other travelers to travel through the dark without swerving and without “[making] more dead.”

GRADE 11 (MAGIC OF WORDS: HSEB NEPAL)

A WORN PATH

          --by Eudora Welty

In Egyptian mythology, the Phoenix was a bird… In what way is Phoenix Jackson like the bird phoenix?(Ref. Magic of Words, 82: 3)

There is no doubt Phoenix Jackson lives up to her name that is borrowed from the mythological Egyptian bird phoenix, which supposedly burnt itself on a funeral pyre every five or six centuries and rose from the ashes with renewed youth.

Like the mythological bird, the old Phoenix is portrayed as timelessly old, for there is no accounting for her age. “Her eyes were blue with age,” the face bore “numberless branching wrinkles” and she walked “from side to side in her steps.” Yet, she outlives such disabling physicality and, with some renewed vitality of a youth indicated by the “golden colour” that runs underneath her face, accomplishes her insurmountable journey to the town to fetch medicine for her grandson. The obstacles like the frozen earth, the deep woods, the steep hill, the thorns, the white man, the phantom, and so on that she is faced with on her way are only too many for an old lady like her. But, she is not weighed down by them and relentlessly pursues her goal like a passionate youth with his/ her eyes fixed on the pursuit of a most-cherished object. In fact, Phoenix Jackson displays unimaginable resilience, unparallel heroism, and unwavering resolution typical of those with the vigour and determination of a youth. Besides, she is fortitude personified. In sum, the old Phoenix has some kind of regeneration of her older self with renewed youth, which is justifiably comparable with the regeneration of the mythological bird phoenix.

MY HEART LEAPS UP WHEN I BEHOLD

                      --by William Wordsworth

Explain the paradox in “The Child is father of the Man.”

The paradox in the above line that is part of William Wordsworth’s poem My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold is placed in a context in which the speaker fondly speaks of his fascination to see the rainbow—or in other words to see the grandeur of nature, which he considers timeless or everlasting. Although the paradox seems evident in the line, it is not hard to see the truth that is uncontested. Drawing on how he had his fascination for the rainbow when he was a child and how the fascination still sustains at his adulthood, the speaker hopes the same to be true when he is old. It is at this point that the speaker employs the aforesaid paradox to suggest that it is, in fact, the very character of a child that determines what he must be like as a man. In other words, a man evolves or grows out of a child and shares the same early disposition. Of course, while it may be common to see the man as father of the child in biological terms, the paradox, however, inverts these roles and stresses another truth of how the child also is capable of begetting a man. To put it in the context of the speaker, since his past has begotten his present, so must his present beget his future too. In other words, the paradox is parallel in meaning to the proverb “Morning shows the day.”