How does Lysistrata use appeals to basic human desires as tools of control to accomplish her objective? [15 Marks]
Question 2
Mention and explain FIVE themes in Bose Afolayan's Once Upon an Elephant.
Question 3
How does Idee Oseyande achieve realism in "Warri Nor Dey Carry Last?" [15 Marks]
Question 4
Discuss Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre as a mirror of class disparity in the Victorian era.
Question 5
Discuss how images are used to convey terror in Oswald Mbuyiseni Mshali's "Nightfall in Soweto."
Question 6
Examine Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" as dramatic monologue.
Question 7
Adapted from Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Oceanic Being"
i. What is your general impression of this passage?
ii. Give three examples from the passage to show that the prose passage is very poetic.
iii. What is the feeling and mood of the speaker in the passage? Give reasons.
iv. (a) Identify two figures of speech in the passage and comment on their use. (b) Mention five important points to bear in mind when answering an unseen prose passage.
Question 8 (Poem)
A. Identify and discuss the use of any FIVE (5) images in the development of the poem. (10 marks)
B. Discuss how Truth and justice are ironically portrayed in the poem.
#Possible answers
Answer 1: How does Lysistrata use appeals to basic human desires as tools of control to accomplish her objective? [15 Marks]
In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the protagonist achieves her anti-war objective not through political authority, which women in ancient Greece lacked, but by strategically weaponizing fundamental human desires. Lysistrata understands that desire—particularly sexual and emotional longing—is a more reliable motivator than reason or patriotism.
Sexual desire as political leverage: The most explicit mechanism of control is the sex strike. By persuading women across Greece to withhold sexual intimacy from their husbands until peace is negotiated, Lysistrata transforms a private, instinctual drive into a collective bargaining tool. The men, depicted as increasingly desperate and physically frustrated, become psychologically unmoored. Their military resolve collapses because warfare cannot sustain itself against the more immediate urgency of sexual deprivation. Aristophanes highlights that the male ego, so dominant in the public sphere of battle, is fatally vulnerable in the private sphere of desire.
Emotional desire as reinforcement: Beyond the physical, Lysistrata appeals to the men’s longing for domestic harmony, companionship, and family unity—all casualties of prolonged war. She also mobilizes the women’s emotional desire for safety, stability, and the return of living husbands rather than fallen heroes. This dual strategy ensures solidarity among the women while isolating the men psychologically.
Conclusion: By redirecting basic human instincts toward political ends, Lysistrata demonstrates that desire, when collectively and strategically controlled, can override military logic and patriarchal authority. The play thus uses comedy to advance a serious argument: power resides not only in weapons but in the very drives that make us human.
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Answer 2: Mention and explain FIVE themes in Bose Afolayan's Once Upon an Elephant
Afolayan’s Once Upon an Elephant engages with multiple interconnected themes that critique moral decay and leadership failure in a traditional African setting.
1. Infidelity: The play presents infidelity as a destructive force that destabilizes both family and state. Serubawon’s affair with the late king’s wife directly produces Ajanaku, whose illegitimate birth becomes the catalyst for political chaos. Afolayan suggests that private moral failure inevitably generates public consequences, blurring the boundary between personal betrayal and communal crisis.
2. Madness: Madness operates both literally and symbolically. The late king’s wife is accused of insanity, yet the accusation itself reflects societal scapegoating. Symbolically, madness describes the irrationality of corrupt leadership—decisions made without consultation, elders ignored, and tradition abandoned. Afolayan uses madness to diagnose a society suffering psychological collapse under tyranny.
3. Struggle for Power: Power in the play is not inherited through legitimate lineage but seized through ambition. Ajanaku, an illegitimate son, contests for kingship while the father still lives, violating customary succession. This struggle produces betrayal, factional violence, and moral degradation. The theme critiques leadership structures that reward force and cunning rather than merit and service.
4. Tyranny: Ajanaku exemplifies the tyrant who rules by decree, seizes communal farmland, raises taxes arbitrarily, and silences elders. Afolayan portrays tyranny as a cancer: absolute power without accountability destroys trust, breeds rebellion, and hollows out governance from within. The theme serves as a warning against dictatorship disguised as leadership.
5. Injustice: The most pervasive moral failure is injustice—innocent characters suffer, the guilty escape, and fairness is replaced by power. Discrimination, wrongful judgment, and the silencing of truth define the social order. Afolayan uses this theme to generate sympathy for the oppressed and to argue for structural reform grounded in equity rather than force.
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Answer 3: How does Idee Oseyande achieve realism in "Warri Nor Dey Carry Last?" [15 Marks]
Realism, as a literary mode, seeks to represent everyday life accurately without romanticization or idealization. In "Warri Nor Dey Carry Last," Idee Oseyande employs several techniques to achieve a truthful depiction of contemporary Nigerian urban experience.
1. Authentic portrayal of police brutality and corruption: Oseyande refuses to sanitize law enforcement. Characters encounter extortion, harassment, and abuse of power in ways that mirror documented realities of Nigerian policing. By presenting these encounters as routine rather than exceptional, the narrative achieves verisimilitude—the appearance of truth.
2. Workplace violations as plausible consequence: The transgression of company rules by Sandra and Okimute, followed by realistic disciplinary outcomes, reflects genuine corporate environments. The consequences are neither melodramatically tragic nor conveniently resolved; instead, they follow ordinary logic, strengthening the narrative’s credibility.
3. Unflinching depiction of urban hardship: Lagos is presented not as a setting but as a pressure system—overcrowding, traffic, the myth of greener pastures, the necessity of outsmarting others to survive. Oseyande avoids sentimental poverty narratives, instead showing survival as exhausting, compromised, and relentless. This unromanticized lens is the hallmark of literary realism.
Conclusion: Through these elements, Oseyande achieves a prose that does not merely refer to Nigerian reality but formally embodies it—making "Warri Nor Dey Carry Last" a document of social truth rather than escapist fiction.
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Answer 4: Discuss Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre as a mirror of class disparity in the Victorian era
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre functions as a powerful social document reflecting the rigid class stratification of Victorian England. Through Jane’s episodic journey—from Gateshead to Lowood to Thornfield to Moor House—Bronte exposes how class determines identity, opportunity, and human worth.
1. Class and personal worth: At Gateshead, Jane is biologically a Reed but socially a pariah. Her cousin John Reed’s assertion that she is “less than a servant” demonstrates how Victorian society equated low birth with low moral worth. Bronte shows that class, not character, governed respect.
2. Education as ambivalent mobility: Lowood School represents the institutional ceiling for poor girls—discipline, deprivation, and endurance without aspiration. Yet education becomes Jane’s fragile ladder to the governess position. However, the governess occupies a liminal space: above servants but beneath the gentry. Bronte portrays education as both enabling and entrapping.
3. The governess as class paradox: At Thornfield, Jane lives within elite space but never belongs to it. When Rochester proposes marriage, society deems the match inappropriate not because of moral failing but because of class crossing. Jane’s famous speech—“Do you think I am an automaton?”—is fundamentally a class抗议, asserting emotional equality against social hierarchy.
4. Class instability through contrast: Thornfield represents inherited wealth and patriarchal power. Moor House, by contrast, shows educated, refined people in financial decline. This juxtaposition reveals class as arbitrary and unstable, not a divine or natural order.
5. Resolution through social reversal: Jane’s inheritance and Rochester’s physical and economic debility produce near-equality in their final marriage. Bronte offers not revolution but reform: relationships based on mutual respect rather than class superiority.
Conclusion: Jane Eyre mirrors Victorian class disparity not as passive reflection but as active critique. Bronte gives voice to the disempowered and insists that dignity is not a privilege of birth.
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Answer 5: Discuss how images are used to convey terror in Oswald Mbuyiseni Mshali's "Nightfall in Soweto"
In “Nightfall in Soweto,” Oswald Mbuyiseni Mshali transforms the ordinary cycle of day into night into a metaphor for apartheid terror. Through a dense network of visual, auditory, and animalistic imagery, Mshali immerses the reader in the psychological and physical experience of oppression.
1. Night as disease: The poem opens with night coming “like a dreaded disease”—a simile that frames darkness not as rest but as infection. Disease ravages unpredictably, weakens from within, and kills. By extension, apartheid operates as a systemic illness upon the black body politic.
2. Violent human imagery: Night is populated by murderers lurking “in the shadows with daggers.” This concrete visual image—the blade, the shadow, the helpless victim—eliminates abstraction. Terror becomes tactile and immediate.
3. Animalistic imagery of predator and prey: The persona describes himself as “the prey” and “the quarry,” while his killers are “beasts.” This double dehumanization reduces oppressed and oppressor alike to animal struggle. The hunt is relentless, and safety is abolished.
4. The matchbox house as failed shelter: The home is a “matchbox house”—fragile, tiny, crushable. Even indoors, the persona must barricade himself. This image inverts the traditional symbolism of home as sanctuary, showing that under terror, nowhere is safe.
5. Auditory imagery of dread: “Crunching footsteps,” “deafening knock,” and a voice that “barks like a rabid dog” translate fear into sound. The knock is not an announcement but a violation. Auditory imagery makes the reader hear what the persona hears, collapsing distance between text and reader.
Conclusion: Mshali’s imagistic strategy forces the reader to experience terror sensorily. Night is not a time of peace but a recurring condition of political horror.
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Answer 6: Examine Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" as dramatic monologue
Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a definitive example of the dramatic monologue, a poetic form in which a single speaker addresses a silent listener, inadvertently revealing his character through his own words. Browning uses the form to execute a psychological portrait of aristocratic sociopathy.
1. Single speaker controlling discourse: The Duke of Ferrara speaks throughout; the Duchess never responds, nor does the emissary. The reader has no external narrator to mediate or moralize. This formal constraint forces the reader to infer character solely from what the Duke chooses to say—and, crucially, what he reveals without intending to.
2. The silent listener as dramatic device: The emissary is present—the Duke addresses him directly, shows him the portrait, pauses for rhetorical effect—yet he never speaks. His silence intensifies the Duke’s dominance and creates dramatic tension. We watch the Duke perform for an audience that cannot correct or interrupt him.
3. Gradual self-revelation: The Duke complains that the Duchess smiled too freely, valued his “favor” equally with a sunset or a cherry branch. His possessive jealousy emerges not through confession but through casual grievance. The line “I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together” is the poem’s moral pivot—delivered so calmly that the horror is almost missed. Browning shows evil not as melodrama but as ordinary entitlement.
4. Dramatic irony: The Duke believes he is presenting himself as a wronged nobleman. The reader, however, sees arrogance, cruelty, and a chilling capacity for violence. Irony operates throughout: every justification becomes an indictment.
5. Symbolic closing: The Duke finishes the monologue by directing attention to a statue of Neptune taming a seahorse—an image of domination. The marriage negotiation with the Count’s daughter continues, implying repetition. The dramatic monologue thus captures not a single moment but a perpetual condition of control.
Conclusion: “My Last Duchess” demonstrates that the dramatic monologue is not merely a technical form but a psychological scalpel. Browning cuts into the Duke’s consciousness and exposes what privilege conceals: tyranny dressed as taste.