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.” 

ON THE VANITY OF EARTHLY GREATNESS 

     --by Arthur Guiterman

Discuss irony in “On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness.”

Arthur Guiterman’s poem ‘On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness,’ divided into four stanzas of a couplet each, is an ironical poem that touches upon the vanity of human/ earthly greatness and demonstrates how such vanity must finally give in to the remorselessly destructive power of time.

The irony is, in fact, pervasive throughout the poem and is captured in each last phrase in the first three couplets and in the first line in the last couplet. The first couplet, for instance, invokes an image of the powerful tusks of mastodons or mammoths employed in the fiercest of battles turning into billiard balls. The invocation here is to suggest how the supposed might of a ferocious, gigantic creature finally turns into an object of play and gets tossed around by petty force. The same applies to the sword of Charlemagne the Just that helped the conqueror win over most of Western Europe but has now ultimately and ironically turned into rust with no power whatsoever. Besides, it is equally ironic that the fearsome grizzly bear ends up becoming a rug for all to tread on and wipe their shoe sole with. Likewise, the fact that Great Caesar, a statesman and general of Rome who lived around 103—44 BC, has been turned into a bust to decorate one’s shelf also shows the ironical fate that the supposed bravery must share at the end. It is with this knowledge then that the speaker ultimately suggests in a very indirect manner that his own vanity, too, is approaching an end since he doesn’t feel well himself.

LOOK AT A TEACUP

                               --by Patricia Hampl

Explain “The cup is a detail, a small uncharred finger from the mid-century bonfire.

The given line from Patricia Hampl’s “Look at a Teacup” employs two disparate metaphors of a “finger” and a “bonfire” in its consideration of the teacup, which is the central image in the essay.

The cup, indeed, is a detail—a detail that people like Hampl must live with since their past is intricately woven in it and no books can adequately describe that lost past like the teacup. The cup is actually capable of invoking the past memories with an unimaginable immediacy and remains a constant companion, which symbolically details the disruption of life and devastation in its discontinued patterns. Yet, at the same time, it also serves as a living testimony of the Czech way of life and their artistic creativity. In other words, the cup is part of history and is representative of all that has survived, yet at the same time suggesting the horrific loss that the cup bore witness to. From Hampl’s mother’s personal life to the lives of the Czech to the falling of the nations, the cup seems to chronicle and recount history in its own peculiar way. It is, therefore, rightly an “uncharred finger” that has remained unscathed and unburnt (and therefore not lost to forgotten history) despite the magnitude of the “mid-century bonfire,” that is, the Second World War, which led to an unprecedented devastation in the history of the humankind. It is aptly a “finger” because it is part of our own being—our lives—that lost so much of the human element during the war

Discovering meaning of the essay “Look at a Teacup” depends on discovering a thread of associations. Discuss.

 “Look at a Teacup” is not an essay on any ordinary teacup but a teacup that has a special historical significance by virtue of its presence in a critical moment in the history of humankind. No wonder, understanding the meaning of the essay on such a teacup, hence, demand s an awareness of any existent thread of associations--associations between seemingly disparate elements. 

While on the surface, one may not see much significance in the description of the teacup or the discussion of the issues such as marriage, family and sexuality, the essay actually uses the same subjects to make a significant observation. For instance, it is through the teacup that the essay explores the history of a fallen nation, its people’s lives (including that of Hampl’s mother’s), their artistic creativity, and ghastly devastation caused by the Second World War. In addition, the issues such as marriage, family and sexuality also serve to offer the author’s own divergent notions of such issues. In discussing marriage, the essay lets us know how Hampl considers it secondary to her writing career following her disillusionment with the overly-indulgent conventional marriage, and the modern “relationships” that seem to substitute for the traditional “marriage.” In the same vein, the essay touches upon the issue of family and offers a radical perception of considering it unimportant as opposed to industry or work. Further, the essay also, in referring to women from two different generations, reflects on their disparate roles with a tacit criticism of one and emphatic advocacy of another. In other words, Hampl’s political interest in digging up history to find answers is lauded by the essay. All such observations would barely be possible if one were to overlook the relationship among the issues.