English Literature: 40 MCQs with Answers

The first two stanzas are warm and affectionate. The speaker imagines the woman reading by the fire and remembering the soft look of her eyes, and he recalls how one man loved her pilgrim soul. The final stanza changes key: bending beside the glowing bars she is to murmur ‘a little sadly’ how Love fled, paced upon the mountains and hid his face amid a crowd of stars. The vocabulary of flight, hiding and remoteness makes the close elegiac. The movement is therefore from loving to mournful, not from hope to despair or from affection to resentment.

The phrase ‘nodding by the fire’ appeals directly to the reader’s senses and creates a picture of an old woman drowsing in the warmth of the hearth, her head dipping as sleep overtakes her. Language that works in this way, by making the reader see, hear or feel a scene, is called imagery. There is no repetition of initial consonant sounds, so alliteration is not the answer; no lifeless thing is given human qualities here, so it is not personification; and no implied comparison between two unlike things is made, so it is not a metaphor.

The ‘glowing bars’ are the metal bars of the fireplace grate, glowing red with the fire behind them, and the woman bends towards them for warmth as she murmurs her memories. In the poem the hearth stands for comfort, intimacy and the settled quiet of old age, and it is the physical centre of the whole imagined scene. Reading the bars as prison bars of loneliness or as barriers around her heart forces a meaning the poem does not support, since the fire in the first stanza is already a picture of homely warmth rather than confinement.

The ‘one man’ who loved the pilgrim soul in the woman and even the sorrows of her changing face is the speaker himself. He asks her to recognise, in old age, the depth of a love she did not return, and the closing image of Love fleeing and hiding his face amid a crowd of stars records that loss. The poem is addressed to Maud Gonne, the Irish revolutionary whom Yeats loved and who repeatedly refused his proposals of marriage. It is therefore the poet whose love remains unrequited, not the woman or her other admirers.

A pilgrim is a person who journeys to a sacred place, and by extension any traveller on a long and purposeful journey. ‘Wayfarer’, meaning one who travels on foot, is therefore the closest synonym among the options. When Yeats speaks of the ‘pilgrim soul’ he means the restless, questing, spiritually adventurous nature of the woman, which is what the speaker loved rather than her looks. A saint is a holy person rather than a traveller, a place of worship is a location and not a person, and an idolator is one who worships images.

The melancholy of the poem grows out of a sustained contrast. Against the present picture of a woman old, grey and full of sleep, nodding by the fire, the poet sets the remembered beauty of eyes with a soft look, moments of glad grace and crowds of admirers. Placing these two states side by side is juxtaposition, and it makes the reader feel the distance travelled from youth to age. There is no exaggeration for effect, so hyperbole is ruled out; love is not compared to fire using ‘like’ or ‘as’; and no line openings are repeated.

In W. Somerset Maugham’s humorous essay ‘The Luncheon’, the struggling young writer watches in horror as his guest, who claims never to eat more than one thing for luncheon, orders one costly item after another. The giant asparagus arrives swimming in melted butter, and the narrator confesses that its smell tickled his nostrils as the nostrils of Jehovah were tickled by the burnt offerings of the virtuous Semites. The biblical comparison is deliberately grand and heightens the comedy of a man who is calculating whether he can pay the bill.

Bama is the pen name of Faustina Mary Fatima Rani, a Tamil Dalit Christian writer and teacher. Writing in Tamil, she recorded the double oppression of caste and gender in her autobiographical novel ‘Karukku’, which appeared in 1992 and is regarded as a landmark of Dalit literature. An extract from it is prescribed in the school syllabus along with a passage from Zitkala-Sa in the chapter ‘Memories of Childhood’. Her later works include ‘Sangati’ and ‘Vanmam’, and her prose is noted for its use of spoken Dalit Tamil.

Received Pronunciation is usually described as having twenty vowel sounds, made up of twelve pure vowels or monophthongs and eight diphthongs. A monophthong keeps a single steady quality throughout, as in the vowels of ‘sit’, ‘cat’ or ‘book’. A diphthong is a glide within one syllable from one vowel quality towards another, as in the vowels of ‘day’, ‘boy’ or ‘house’. The eight diphthongs are conventionally grouped into three closing to /ɪ/, two closing to /ʊ/ and three centring towards /ə/. Together with twenty-four consonants they give the forty-four phonemes of English.

The Abbey Theatre in Dublin, formally the National Theatre of Ireland, was founded in 1904 chiefly by W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, with the support of Edward Martyn and John Millington Synge. It grew out of the Irish Literary Theatre and became the artistic centre of the Irish Literary Revival, staging plays that drew on Irish myth, folklore and peasant speech in place of imported English drama. Synge’s ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ famously caused riots there in 1907. Georgie Hyde-Lees was Yeats’s wife and Anne Gregory the subject of one of his poems.