LIT 001: INTRODUCTION TO DRAMA
- Discuss the theme of rebellion in Henry IV. [15 marks]
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
King Lear Act 4 scene 1.
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Demonstrate the extent to which the excerpt is dramatized in King Lear. [15 marks]
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Discuss Femi Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers as a Sociological play. [15 marks]
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Examine Ngugi’s treatment of religion in I Will Marry When I Want. [15 marks]
LIT 002: INTRODUCTION TO PROSE FICTION
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"Hard Times is built on irony." Discuss this in relation to characterisation and theme in the novel. [15 marks]
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Examine gender inequality in The Mill on the Floss. [15 marks]
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In Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, Beatrice is a metaphor of the modern African woman. Discuss. [15 marks]
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Describe Darko’s Beyond the Horizon as a prose fiction. [15 marks]
LIT 003: INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
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In Hardlines, Adeoti employs unusual images to buttress his theme. Explain the significance of these images. [15 marks]
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Discuss Osundare’s “Farmer-born” as a romantic poem. [15 marks]
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Examine John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” as a nature poem. [15 marks]
LIT 004: LITERARY APPRECIATION AND PRACTICAL CRITICISM
- READ THE PASSAGE BELOW AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS THAT FOLLOW:
Me? Steal? My ankles start to wobble, ready to turn me around and go home because my mother did not stay in labour for over ten hours for one small girl to be insulting me! Just because I am a caterer, she thinks that she can talk to me anyhow? Me. My palms press down on my breasts. Me. After all, I studied Agriculture at the polytechnic – even though I didn’t finish. I am no illiterate. I start to walk away but two months’ rent and maybe a new wheelchair for Biyi make me do a funny about-turn that might look like an awkward dance to Red Lipstick girl who merely quirks a brow. I breathe. I hope she is not around when I am cooking because it will ruin everything. When Biyi’s mother annoyed me by asking if I had swallowed her grandchildren, I cooked egusi that tasted vile as cow’s vomit even though I didn’t cook it different from usual. I do not calculate anything like the people who say ten spoons of salt and five cubes of Maggi; I just add the ingredients until I feel that it is okay. And when I am angry, it ruins everything. (From ‘Caterer, Caterer’ by Pemi Aguda).
(a) Identify the technique that enables us to read the speaker’s thoughts and examine what it reveals about the persona’s character.
(b) Determine whether the persona should be taken seriously or not.
[15 marks]
- READ THE POEM BELOW AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS THAT FOLLOW:
Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads.
He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus said, “I want to ask one question. Why didn’t I recognize my mother?”
“You gave the wrong answer,” said the Sphinx. “But that was what made everything possible,” said Oedipus. “No,” she said.
"When I asked, what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn’t.
“When I asked, what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn’t say anything about woman.”
“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include women too. Everyone knows that.” She said, “That’s what you think.”
(From ‘Myth’ by Muriel Rukeyser)
- (a) Discuss the type of the poem and its significance.
(b) What do you think the poem is all about?
[15 marks]
#solutions
LIT 001: INTRODUCTION TO DRAMA
Question 1: Discuss the theme of rebellion in Henry IV. [15 marks]
Introduction
Shakespeare’s Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2) is fundamentally preoccupied with the theme of rebellion — political, personal, and generational. Rebellion operates on multiple levels: the civil uprising against King Henry IV, Prince Hal’s rejection of courtly responsibility, and the broader question of legitimacy in governance.
Political Rebellion
The most overt strand of rebellion is the armed uprising led by Hotspur (Henry Percy), Owen Glendower, and Edmund Mortimer against King Henry IV. This revolt is rooted in a sense of political betrayal — the rebels feel that Henry, having used their support to usurp Richard II, has denied them their due rewards. Hotspur declares this grievance with passion, his honour-driven personality making him the embodiment of hot-blooded rebellion. Shakespeare presents this uprising not simply as treachery but as a consequence of Henry’s own illegitimate seizure of the crown — rebellion, in this reading, is the inevitable fruit of usurpation.
Personal and Moral Rebellion
Prince Hal’s rebellion is subtler but equally significant. His association with Falstaff and the tavern world of Eastcheap represents a deliberate rejection of his royal identity and duties. The tavern is a carnivalesque inversion of the court — here, Hal can mock his own kingship in play, rehearsing and subverting authority simultaneously. Yet Hal’s soliloquy in Act 1 Scene 2 — “I know you all, and will a while uphold / The unyoked humour of your idleness” — reveals that his rebellion is calculated. He will shine all the brighter by contrast when he eventually assumes his role.
Falstaff as Symbol of Rebellious Disorder
Falstaff embodies a philosophical rebellion against responsibility, honour, and the values of the ruling order. His famous catechism on honour — “What is honour? A word.” — directly subverts the chivalric code Hotspur worships. Falstaff refuses to take seriously the very hierarchies that structure the political world, making him both comic and dangerously anarchic.
Resolution of Rebellion
Shakespeare ultimately punishes open rebellion — Hotspur is killed by Hal at Shrewsbury — while rewarding the calculated, self-aware rebellion of Hal, who reconciles with his father and emerges as a credible heir. The play thus suggests that rebellion must be internalised, disciplined, and eventually transcended rather than indulged or acted upon violently.
Conclusion
Rebellion in Henry IV is not merely political upheaval; it is the central moral and dramatic tension through which Shakespeare explores the making of kingship, the nature of honour, and the conflict between duty and desire.
Question 2: Demonstrate the extent to which the excerpt from King Lear is dramatised. [15 marks]
The Excerpt:
“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport.” — Gloucester, Act 4 Scene 1
Introduction
These lines, spoken by the blinded Gloucester, represent one of the bleakest philosophical statements in all of Shakespeare. They express a vision of a malevolent or indifferent universe in which human beings are powerless playthings of capricious divine forces. The question is: to what extent does the dramatic action of King Lear bear out this despairing worldview?
Evidence That Supports the Worldview
The play powerfully dramatises the idea of arbitrary, disproportionate suffering. Lear, a man who makes a foolish but human error in misjudging his daughters, is punished with catastrophic totality — he loses his kingdom, his sanity, his loyal companion Cordelia, and finally his life. The punishment far exceeds the crime. Similarly, Gloucester is literally blinded for loyalty to his king — an act of savage irony since his physical blindness mirrors his earlier moral blindness about Edgar and Edmund.
The storm scenes in Act 3 are the most powerful theatrical embodiment of the excerpt. Lear rages against the elements, but the storm is indifferent — it does not relent because a king commands it. The universe of the play appears godless or worse: actively hostile. The gods Lear invokes — “You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout” — never respond.
Cordelia’s death is perhaps the most devastating dramatic confirmation of Gloucester’s words. She is entirely virtuous, selfless, and loyal. Her execution is arbitrary — a clerical error of war, an order not countermanded in time. Her death produces no redemptive logic. Even Albany’s attempt at resolution — “The gods defend her” — is immediately mocked by Lear entering with Cordelia’s body. The gods do not defend her.
Evidence That Partially Qualifies the Worldview
Shakespeare does not allow the play to be entirely nihilistic. Edgar’s survival and moral growth suggest that human endurance and compassion have value, even in a brutal universe. His care for his blinded father is deeply humane. Kent’s loyalty unto death similarly affirms that human love can persist against cosmic indifference.
Moreover, the villains — Goneril, Regan, Edmund — destroy each other. There is a rough justice in their ends, even if it comes too late to save the innocent. Edmund even repents before death, attempting to save Cordelia — though his gesture fails.
Conclusion
The excerpt is dramatised with shattering force throughout King Lear. The play provides overwhelming evidence for Gloucester’s nihilistic vision, particularly through the storm, the blinding, and Cordelia’s death. However, Shakespeare holds in tension the possibility of human dignity and moral endurance, preventing the play from fully collapsing into despair. The truth of the excerpt is demonstrated most powerfully by the fact that it cannot be entirely refuted.
Question 3: Discuss Femi Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers as a Sociological Play. [15marks]
Introduction
A sociological play is one that uses dramatic form to examine, critique, and illuminate the structures, inequalities, and contradictions of the society in which it is embedded. Femi Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers (1980) is a paradigm case of this genre — a work that uses the parable of armed robbery to interrogate the failures of Nigerian post-independence society with Marxist clarity and theatrical audacity.
Social Context and Setting
Written in the aftermath of military rule and amid escalating economic inequality in Nigeria, the play refuses to treat armed robbery as a simple moral problem. Osofisan insists that crime is a social product. His four robbers — Major, Alhaji, Squire, and Hassan — are not born criminals but dispossessed members of a society that has failed them. They have been excluded from the wealth that a corrupt elite appropriates freely and legally. In this sense, Osofisan asks a pointed sociological question: what is the difference between the armed robber and the corrupt politician?
Class Conflict and Economic Inequality
The play’s central sociological argument is that capitalism in its Nigerian manifestation produces robbery at every level of society. The robbers steal out of necessity; the ruling class steals through institutionalised corruption. Osofisan’s stage — often a marketplace — becomes a microcosm of a society organised around exchange, competition, and exploitation. The magic that the robbers obtain to freeze their victims and steal from them is a theatrical metaphor for how the powerful immobilise the poor while appropriating their resources.
The Role of the Audience
Osofisan’s most radical sociological device is his use of the audience as participants in the play’s moral dilemma. At the play’s climax, the audience must vote on whether the robbers should be executed or freed. This Brechtian technique refuses the comfort of aesthetic distance — it implicates the audience in the very social judgements the play critiques. The audience’s decision becomes a measure of the society’s collective moral consciousness.
The State and the Law
The soldiers who execute robbers are shown as instruments of a state that protects elite property while brutalising the poor. Osofisan exposes the law not as a neutral guarantor of justice but as a tool of class domination. The public execution of armed robbers — a reality in Nigeria during the period — is presented as spectacle that deflects attention from the structural causes of crime.
Conclusion
Once Upon Four Robbers is sociological drama at its most committed. Osofisan uses theatrical form — parable, music, audience participation, Marxist analysis — to lay bare the structures of inequality that produce crime and suffering in Nigerian society. The play does not merely depict social reality; it challenges its audience to understand, judge, and ultimately transform it.
Question 4: Examine Ngugi’s Treatment of Religion in I Will Marry When I Want. [15 marks]
Introduction
In I Will Marry When I Want (1977), co-written with Ngugi wa Mirii, Ngugi wa Thiong’o presents religion — specifically Christianity — as a central instrument of colonial and neo-colonial oppression. Far from offering liberation, the Christianity depicted in the play functions to pacify the poor, legitimate exploitation, and sever African communities from their cultural and political resistance.
Christianity as a Tool of Colonialism
Ngugi’s central argument is that the church was historically the ideological arm of colonial conquest. Through the character of Kiguunda’s family, we see how Christianity was used to undermine traditional African values — including communal land ownership, indigenous marriage customs, and cultural identity. The demand that Kiguunda and Wangeci undergo a church wedding, at great financial cost, is presented as a trap: it forces them into debt, making them financially vulnerable to the economically powerful Ahab Kioi wa Kanoru.
Religion and Class Exploitation
Kioi is a Christian elder and businessman — a figure who uses religious respectability as cover for economic exploitation. He pressures Kiguunda into the expensive Christian wedding while simultaneously scheming to acquire Kiguunda’s land for a factory development. Ngugi brilliantly exposes the hypocrisy: religion provides the language of brotherhood and moral authority, while the actual social relations remain those of predator and prey.
The Complicity of the Church
The local church does not challenge exploitation — it reinforces it. Religious ceremonies require money that the poor do not have, creating dependency and debt. The church blesses the social order rather than questioning it, preaching acceptance of suffering as God’s will. This is the classic Marxist critique of religion as ideology — a false consciousness that reconciles the oppressed to their oppression.
Traditional Religion and Resistance
Against Christianity, Ngugi implicitly rehabilitates indigenous African spirituality and cultural practice. The songs, dances, and traditions that the play celebrates represent a counter-culture of resistance — a community’s connection to its land, ancestors, and collective identity. These traditions were suppressed by colonial Christianity, and their recovery is linked to political awakening.
Conclusion
Ngugi’s treatment of religion in I Will Marry When I Want is uncompromisingly critical. Christianity is presented not as spiritual truth but as ideological infrastructure — a system that serves the interests of colonial and neo-colonial capital. Yet the play is not merely destructive: it points toward the recovery of indigenous culture and collective consciousness as the basis for genuine liberation.
LIT 002: INTRODUCTION TO PROSE FICTION
Question 5: "Hard Times is built on irony." Discuss in relation to characterisation and theme. [15 marks]
Introduction
Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) is one of the most sustained exercises in literary irony in the Victorian novel. Irony — the gap between what is said or believed and what is actually true — operates at every level of the text, from individual characterisation to the novel’s broadest thematic concerns. Dickens uses irony not merely as a stylistic device but as the primary means by which he exposes the failure of utilitarian philosophy and industrial capitalism.
Irony in Characterisation: Thomas Gradgrind
The supreme irony of Hard Times is located in Thomas Gradgrind himself. He is the novel’s most committed advocate of Facts and rational utility — a man who believes that human beings can and should be educated purely on empirical data, with no room for fancy, imagination, or emotion. Yet his system destroys the very people it claims to improve. His daughter Louisa is emotionally stunted, unable to name or act on her own feelings. His son Tom becomes a thief and moral coward. The man who believes most fervently in the power of rational systems to produce good outcomes produces two of the novel’s most damaged characters.
The irony deepens when Gradgrind is forced, by the end of the novel, to acknowledge the inadequacy of his philosophy. His conversion is painful precisely because it is the destruction of his life’s intellectual project.
Irony in Characterisation: Josiah Bounderby
Bounderby is built almost entirely on ironic exposure. He presents himself as a self-made man — a man who rose from the gutter, abandoned by his mother, who bootstrapped himself to wealth through sheer effort. This self-mythology is his defining characteristic and social identity. The irony is absolute: Mrs Pegler, his doting mother, reveals that Bounderby’s entire rags-to-riches narrative is fabricated. He was not abandoned but raised with care and affection. The man who most loudly proclaims self-reliance is in fact a fraud.
Thematic Irony: Facts vs. Human Truth
The novel’s central ironic theme is that a philosophy devoted to Facts ultimately produces falsehood — in Bounderby’s lies, in the emotional deceptions Louisa must practice to survive, and in Tom’s criminal self-protection. The utilitarian insistence on measurable reality produces a world saturated in unreality.
The circus folk — Sleary’s company — embody everything the Gradgrind system rejects: pleasure, fancy, instinct, community. Yet they are the most genuinely humane characters in the novel, the ones who ultimately help Tom escape and who demonstrate the value of loyalty and joy. The irony is that the “useless” world of imagination proves more ethically reliable than the world of rational calculation.
Conclusion
Hard Times is indeed built on irony. Dickens systematically constructs characters and situations in which the stated values produce their opposite outcomes, and the despised values prove their indispensable worth. Irony is not decoration in Hard Times — it is the structural principle through which Dickens prosecutes his argument against utilitarian dehumanisation.
Question 6: Examine gender inequality in The Mill on the Floss. [15 marks]
Introduction
George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) is, among other things, a sustained and intimate examination of the gendered structures of Victorian society. Through the character of Maggie Tulliver — brilliant, passionate, and ambitious — Eliot dramatises with painful precision the ways in which women are constrained, diminished, and ultimately destroyed by a social order that assigns them a subordinate, decorative, and domestic role.
Maggie vs. Tom: The Gendered Division of Opportunity
The inequality between Maggie and her brother Tom is established early and maintained throughout. Tom receives a formal education, however ill-suited to his actual temperament and intelligence; Maggie receives none. Yet it is Maggie who is intellectually gifted — she grasps Latin and mathematics far more readily than Tom, who struggles with Stelling’s classical curriculum. The irony is relentless: the person most capable of formal education is systematically excluded from it on grounds of sex.
Tom’s intellectual limitations do not prevent him from taking his place in the world of commerce, property, and authority. Maggie’s intellectual gifts earn her nothing — no career, no independence, no recognised identity beyond her relationships with men.
Marriage and Social Respectability
The novel’s gender critique extends to its treatment of marriage as the primary social institution governing women’s lives. Women in The Mill on the Floss have no legitimate identity outside their relationships to fathers, brothers, and husbands. Maggie’s independence of mind and emotional intensity are presented by her society not as virtues but as threats — signs of a dangerous unruliness that must be contained.
Her relationship with Philip Wakem is suppressed by Tom’s patriarchal authority; her elopement with Stephen Guest destroys her social reputation entirely. The double standard is naked: Stephen, equally culpable, suffers no lasting social damage, while Maggie is effectively exiled from her community.
The Punishment of Female Intelligence and Desire
Eliot suggests that Victorian society cannot accommodate a woman of Maggie’s quality. She is too intelligent for the roles available to her, too passionate for the emotional restraints imposed on her sex, and too morally serious to accept the compromises those roles demand. The novel’s tragic ending — Maggie’s death by flood — has been read as Eliot’s acknowledgement that there is no space within the social order for such a woman to live.
Conclusion
The Mill on the Floss is one of the nineteenth century’s most penetrating analyses of gender inequality. Eliot, writing from her own experience of exclusion and social censure, creates in Maggie a figure whose tragedy is not personal but structural — the product of a society that systematically denies women the space to be fully human.
Question 7: In Anthills of the Savannah, Beatrice is a metaphor of the modern African woman. Discuss. [15 marks]
Introduction
Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) represents a significant development in his treatment of women. In Beatrice Okoh, Achebe creates a female character who is not peripheral or decorative but central to the novel’s moral and political vision. Beatrice has been widely read as a metaphor for the modern African woman — educated, politically conscious, spiritually rooted, and capable of both synthesis and leadership.
Education and Professional Identity
Beatrice is a Senior Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, one of the few women in the novel who occupies a position of professional significance. She has a first-class degree from a British university, and her intellectual capability is established as comparable to — indeed, in some respects surpassing — that of the male characters around her. Achebe deliberately constructs her as the equal of Ikem and Chris in education and analytical intelligence, while giving her something they lack: a capacity for emotional and spiritual synthesis.
Political Consciousness
Beatrice is not merely a private individual caught in the crossfire of masculine politics. She analyses the political situation of Kangan with clarity and moral authority. Her famous rebuke of Sam at the dinner party — her refusal to be complicit in power’s dehumanisation — establishes her as a woman with genuine political agency and courage. She sees what the men around her cannot: that the system is destroying itself and that human dignity must be defended regardless of consequences.
Spiritual and Cultural Synthesis
Achebe gives Beatrice a spiritual dimension that connects her to Idemili, the Igbo goddess of river and moral restraint, the restrainer of masculine excess. This identification suggests that the modern African woman, in Achebe’s vision, carries within her an ancient cultural authority — that her modernity does not sever her from tradition but integrates both. Beatrice becomes a figure of synthesis: African and educated, traditional and contemporary, emotional and analytical.
Leadership After Collapse
After the deaths of Ikem and Chris, it is Beatrice who holds the surviving community together, who organises the naming ceremony for Ikem’s daughter, and who names the child “Amaechina” — “May the path never close.” The naming ceremony, traditionally male, is performed by a woman — a symbolic reversal that Achebe presents not as usurpation but as necessary regeneration. Beatrice becomes the guardian of continuity and hope in a world the men have failed to protect.
Conclusion
Beatrice is a metaphor for the modern African woman in the fullest sense: she embodies the complexity, capability, and responsibility of a generation of African women who are educated, politically engaged, spiritually connected, and ultimately called upon to rebuild what masculine power has destroyed.
Question 8: Describe Darko’s Beyond the Horizon as a prose fiction. [15 marks]
Introduction
Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1995), originally written in German as Ntombidzithandile, is a powerful Ghanaian novel that operates within the tradition of social realist prose fiction. It tells the story of Mara, a young Ghanaian woman who is brought to Germany by her husband Akobi, only to be trafficked into prostitution. As prose fiction, it deploys the characteristic tools of the novel — characterisation, narrative voice, plot structure, and symbolic imagery — to pursue a devastating social critique.
Narrative Voice and Perspective
The novel is narrated in the first person by Mara herself, and this choice is crucial. Darko gives voice directly to a woman who would, in most social and literary contexts, be silenced — a trafficked African woman at the bottom of multiple hierarchies of race, gender, class, and nationality. The first-person narration creates intimacy and moral authority: we experience Mara’s confusion, degradation, and slow awakening from the inside, making detached judgement impossible.
Characterisation
Mara is a complex protagonist — not idealised but deeply human. Her initial naivety, her love for Akobi, her gradual recognition of her situation and her eventual resistance chart a convincing psychological journey. Akobi, by contrast, is portrayed with an unflinching critique: his transformation from husband to trafficker-pimp is presented as both personal moral collapse and a symptom of the dehumanising logic of economic migration and masculinity in crisis. Comfort, Mara’s friend and fellow victim, provides a contrast — she adapts to her situation with a pragmatism that is both survival mechanism and moral compromise.
Themes
The novel addresses migration, gender exploitation, economic desperation, and the African immigrant experience in Europe. Darko refuses to sentimentalise any of these — she presents the economic conditions in Ghana that make women vulnerable, the European context that enables their exploitation, and the complicity of African men who traffic women while performing respectability.
Style and Structure
Darko’s prose is spare, direct, and unsentimental — a style that matches its subject matter. The novel does not aestheticise suffering; it presents it with documentary clarity. The structure follows Mara’s journey geographically — from Ghana to Germany — and psychologically — from innocence to experience, from victimhood toward agency.
Conclusion
Beyond the Horizon is a significant work of African prose fiction — an unflinching social novel that uses the resources of the form to give voice to the voiceless and to expose the intersecting systems of exploitation that trap women like Mara.
LIT 003: INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
Question 9: In Hardlines, Adeoti employs unusual images to buttress his theme. Explain the significance of these images. [15 marks]
Introduction
Gbemisola Adeoti’s poetry collection Hardlines (2004) takes as its central subject the harsh realities of life in contemporary Nigeria — economic hardship, political corruption, social suffering, and the resilience of ordinary people. What makes Adeoti’s work distinctive is his use of unexpected, concrete, and often startling imagery drawn from everyday Nigerian life to articulate these themes with precision and emotional force.
Imagery of Physical Suffering and the Body
Adeoti frequently uses images of the body under stress — emaciated limbs, cracked skin, hollow stomachs — to make abstract economic suffering viscerally immediate. These images refuse the reader the comfort of statistical distance. Poverty is not a policy problem but a body’s lived experience. The physicality of his imagery insists on the full humanity of those who suffer.
Urban and Industrial Imagery
Adeoti draws extensively on the imagery of Nigerian urban life — the danfo bus, the petrol queue, the generator, the borehole. These are images of scarcity and improvisation, the material landscape of a society struggling to maintain basic functionality. Their significance is both documentary and symbolic: they anchor his poetry in a specific social reality while simultaneously representing the broader failure of governance and infrastructure. The generator, for instance, is not merely a power source but a symbol of a state that cannot provide for its citizens, forcing them into expensive, exhausting self-sufficiency.
Imagery of Nature Turned Hostile
Where the Romantic tradition uses nature as a source of consolation and beauty, Adeoti’s natural images often carry menace or irony. Seasons, rivers, and earth are inflected with the conditions of human suffering — drought as political as much as meteorological, floods as symptoms of neglect as much as natural events. This subversion of conventional natural imagery deepens the thematic argument: nature itself has been corrupted by political failure.
Imagery of Resilience
Not all of Adeoti’s imagery is of suffering. He also employs images of stubborn, persistent life — weeds that grow through concrete, fires that burn on scraps — to represent the endurance and creativity of ordinary Nigerians. These images function as a form of tribute and affirmation even within the collection’s overall bleakness.
Conclusion
Adeoti’s unusual imagery in Hardlines is the primary vehicle of his thematic purpose. By rooting abstract social critique in concrete, surprising, and often uncomfortable images drawn from lived experience, he transforms political commentary into poetry of genuine emotional and aesthetic power.
Question 10: Discuss Osundare’s “Farmer-born” as a romantic poem. [15 marks]
Introduction
Niyi Osundare’s “Farmer-born” is a poem that celebrates the rural landscape, agricultural labour, and the poet’s roots in the Yoruba farming community from which he comes. In its celebration of nature, its idealisation of the relationship between human beings and the earth, and its lyrical, sensuous language, it shares significant characteristics with the Romantic poetic tradition — though it infuses this tradition with distinctly African and postcolonial inflections.
Celebration of Nature
Like the English Romantic poets — Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley — Osundare presents nature not as backdrop but as living presence. The farmland of his birth is rendered with sensuous detail: the smell of earth, the texture of crops, the rhythms of seasons. Nature in “Farmer-born” is not threatening or indifferent but nurturing, generative, and deeply connected to human identity. This is quintessentially Romantic in its insistence that human beings are constituted by their relationship to the natural world.
The Idealisation of Rural Life and Labour
Romantic poetry, particularly in its Wordsworthian strand, frequently idealises the pastoral — the shepherd, the reaper, the rural community — as repositories of authentic human values corrupted by urban modernity. Osundare’s poem participates in this tradition: the farmer is not merely an economic unit but a figure of wisdom, rootedness, and moral integrity. Agricultural labour is presented as dignified, meaningful, and spiritually grounded.
Memory, Identity, and Origins
The Romantic preoccupation with memory and origins — the Wordsworthian “spots of time” — resonates strongly in “Farmer-born.” The poem is a meditation on how the conditions of one’s birth and early formation continue to shape identity, perception, and values. Osundare’s identity as a poet is inseparable from his identity as a farmer’s child; the language of poetry is rooted in the language of the earth.
African Romanticism
Crucially, Osundare’s romanticism is not derivative but transformed by its African context. The earth he celebrates is specifically Yoruba earth; the farming community is a specific Nigerian community with its own spiritual and cultural relationships to land. This specificity distinguishes his work from a simple imitation of Western Romanticism and places it within the tradition of African literary celebrations of the land — a tradition connecting Senghor’s Negritude to contemporary eco-poetry.
Conclusion
“Farmer-born” is romantic in both the literary-historical sense and the deeper sense of a poetry animated by reverence, love, and longing for its subject. Osundare transforms the Romantic inheritance through an African lens, producing poetry that celebrates the particular to reach the universal.
Question 11: Examine John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” as a nature poem. [15 marks]
Introduction
John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) is one of the supreme achievements of English Romantic poetry. While it can be read as a meditation on mortality, imagination, and the nature of poetic experience, it is simultaneously a magnificent nature poem — a work in which the natural world, embodied in the nightingale’s song, is the primary source of the poem’s imagery, emotion, and philosophical inquiry.
The Nightingale as Natural Symbol
The nightingale is not merely a bird in Keats’ poem — it is a symbol of the natural world’s capacity to produce beauty that transcends individual mortality. The bird has sung “in ancient days by emperor and clown” — it is identified with an eternal natural order that persists while human generations perish. This use of a natural creature to embody permanence and continuity is characteristic of nature poetry in the Romantic tradition.
Sensuous Natural Imagery
Keats’ celebration of the natural world in the poem is expressed through some of the most richly sensuous imagery in English poetry. The moonlit forest, the “verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways,” the “white hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine” — these images engage multiple senses simultaneously, creating a fully immersive natural environment. Keats’ famous “negative capability” is at work here: he surrenders to the experience of nature rather than imposing a philosophical schema upon it.
Nature as Alternative to Human Suffering
A central movement of the poem is the speaker’s desire to escape human consciousness — with its awareness of ageing, loss, and mortality — into the world of the nightingale, which seems to exist beyond such suffering. Nature here is not merely beautiful but redemptive: a space of freedom from the burden of human self-awareness. This is a profoundly Romantic vision of nature as sanctuary.
The Tension Between Immersion and Return
Yet the poem also registers nature’s ultimate inaccessibility to full human participation. The word “forlorn” brings the speaker back to his “sole self” — the bird’s song recedes, and the dream of merging with natural beauty is revealed as unrealisable. This tension — between the desire for natural transcendence and the inescapability of human consciousness — gives the poem its emotional complexity and prevents it from being merely escapist celebration.
Conclusion
As a nature poem, “Ode to a Nightingale” is unsurpassed in its ability to render the beauty and significance of the natural world in language of corresponding richness. Keats uses the nightingale not as mere ornament but as the vehicle for the poem’s deepest thinking about beauty, time, mortality, and the relationship between human imagination and the natural world.
LIT 004: LITERARY APPRECIATION AND PRACTICAL CRITICISM
Question 12 (a): Identify the narrative technique and what it reveals about the persona. [15 marks combined with (b)]
The Technique: Interior Monologue / Stream of Consciousness
The passage from Pemi Aguda’s “Caterer, Caterer” employs interior monologue — a narrative technique in which the reader has direct, unmediated access to the character’s thoughts, feelings, and mental processes as they unfold in real time. Unlike a third-person narrator’s report of a character’s thoughts, interior monologue presents those thoughts in the character’s own voice and at the speed and texture of actual mental experience.
This is closely related to the stream of consciousness technique, though Aguda’s version is more controlled — the thoughts flow naturally but remain coherent and structured, unlike the more radical fragmentation of Woolf or Joyce.
What the Technique Reveals About the Persona
The interior monologue reveals a complex, layered character whose surface circumstance (a caterer doing a job) conceals rich inner life. Several dimensions of character emerge:
Self-worth and dignity: The persona’s immediate mental response to being insulted — invoking her mother’s labour, her polytechnic education, her professional identity — reveals a person with a strong if precarious sense of self-worth. She is not indifferent to insult; she feels it acutely and marshals arguments against it from within. The repeated “Me” pressed against her own chest is a gesture of self-assertion — she is insisting on her own reality and value.
Economic vulnerability: The abrupt about-turn prompted by “two months’ rent and maybe a new wheelchair for Biyi” reveals the economic constraints that override her dignity. Her self-worth coexists with desperate financial need. This juxtaposition — pride vs. necessity — is the central dramatic and psychological tension of the passage.
Emotional sensitivity and its professional consequences: The anecdote about cooking vile egusi when angered by Biyi’s mother reveals that her emotional state physically manifests in her work. She does not calculate — she cooks by feeling. This makes her both an artist (she works by instinct and emotion) and professionally vulnerable (negative emotions corrupt her art).
Care and responsibility: The reference to Biyi’s wheelchair situates the persona within a web of caring relationships and responsibilities that explain, without diminishing, her willingness to endure humiliation.
Question 12 (b): Determine whether the persona should be taken seriously.
The Persona Should Be Taken Seriously
Despite the comic texture of the narrative — the “funny about-turn,” the vile egusi, the wobbling ankles — the persona demands and deserves to be taken seriously. The comedy is the surface through which serious human truths are communicated.
She is a person navigating real economic precariousness, real social disrespect (class and occupational condescension from “Red Lipstick girl”), and real caring responsibilities. Her intelligence is evident in her self-awareness; she knows she is compromising her dignity, she knows why, and she knows the potential professional cost of her emotional state. This is not the naivety of a comic figure but the clear-eyed pragmatism of a woman managing multiple competing pressures.
Aguda’s use of the interior monologue technique is itself an argument for taking the persona seriously — it grants her full interiority, a complex inner life usually reserved in literature for characters deemed worthy of serious attention. The caterer is not merely comic relief; she is the moral and human centre of the story.
Question 13 & 14: “Myth” by Muriel Rukeyser
14 (a): Discuss the type of poem and its significance.
Type: A Dramatic Lyric / Revisionist Mythological Poem
“Myth” by Muriel Rukeyser is a dramatic lyric that takes the form of a compressed dialogue between two mythological figures — Oedipus and the Sphinx — in a fictional encounter set long after the events of the original myth. More specifically, it belongs to the genre of revisionist mythology — a twentieth-century feminist poetic mode in which classical myths are reread, interrogated, and transformed from a feminist perspective.
The poem is brief and apparently simple, constructed almost entirely of direct speech with minimal narrative framework. Its brevity is itself significant: Rukeyser condenses an enormously consequential argument into a handful of lines, trusting the density of the mythological reference to carry the weight.
Significance of the Type
The revisionist mythological poem is significant because it uses the authority and familiarity of canonical narratives to expose the ideological assumptions embedded in those narratives. By returning to the Oedipus myth — one of Western culture’s foundational stories — Rukeyser exposes something that the myth’s long cultural history has rendered invisible: that the famous riddle of the Sphinx, and Oedipus’s celebrated answer, encodes a fundamental act of erasure. “Man” as the generic human is not neutral — it excludes women while claiming to represent all humanity.
14 (b): What is the poem about?
On one level, the poem is a reinterpretation of the Oedipus myth with a feminist focus. The Sphinx reveals to the blinded, aged Oedipus that he gave the wrong answer — not because his answer was factually incorrect, but because his use of “Man” to represent all humanity erased women from the category of the human. His confident assumption — “When you say Man, you include women too. Everyone knows that” — is precisely what the Sphinx challenges: “That’s what you think.”
On a deeper level, the poem is about language, power, and the politics of naming. Rukeyser argues that the use of masculine generics (“man,” “mankind”) is not linguistically neutral but ideologically loaded — it performs the cultural erasure of women by absorbing them into a category defined by and named after men. Oedipus’s blindness is not only physical (he is old and sightless) but epistemological: he cannot see the exclusion embedded in his own language.
The poem is also, with devastating irony, about the limits of masculine intellectual heroism. Oedipus is celebrated in Western culture as the great solver of riddles, the man whose intelligence saved Thebes. Yet Rukeyser reveals that his celebrated answer contained within it the very blindness that would define his tragedy: the inability to see what is in front of him. He solved the riddle but missed the question.
Finally, the poem engages with the theme of recognition and misrecognition. Oedipus asks why he did not recognise his mother — the original catastrophic failure of the myth. The Sphinx’s answer suggests that the failure of recognition runs deeper than the Oedipus myth itself acknowledges: a man who cannot recognise women as fully human in his language will fail to recognise them in life.