WAEC SSCE - Literature In English - 2015 (Drama & Poetry)

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The Soul's Errand, attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh and also known as The Lie, is a bitter, satirical poem in which a dying speaker sends his soul out on a bold mission to expose the hypocrisy and corruption of the world. The errand of the soul is the central organising idea of the poem.

The nature of the errand. The speaker, feeling that he must soon die, commissions his soul as a messenger. He calls it the body's guest and sends it on a thankless errand into a false and rotten world. The soul is to speak the plain truth fearlessly, taking truth itself as its warrant, and wherever it meets falsehood it is to give the world the lie, that is, to accuse each corrupt institution of lying.

The targets of the errand. The soul is sent to confront the great and powerful and to unmask their pretence. It is to tell the court that it glows and shines like rotten wood; to tell the church that it shows what is good yet does no good; to tell rulers and men in authority that they live by favour and act unjustly; to tell the learned that they lack depth, and the ambitious that they climb by flattery. One by one the soul is to expose the falsehood behind courtiers, churchmen, potentates, lawyers, physicians and every proud class of society.

The tone and purpose. The repeated command to give the lie gives the poem a defiant, accusing rhythm. The speaker is fearless because he is dying and has nothing left to lose; the world can do no worse than kill him, and to stab the soul is impossible. The errand therefore expresses a disillusioned man's determination to tell the whole truth about a hypocritical world before he leaves it.

The errand of the soul is thus a mission of fearless truth-telling and moral condemnation, in which the soul acts as a herald exposing the lies of every corrupt part of society.

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In Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali's Boy on a Swing, the picture of a small black child playing on a swing becomes the vehicle for a serious exploration of the identity crisis suffered by black people under apartheid South Africa.

The swaying swing as a symbol of confusion. The boy is pushed back and forth, and his clothes flutter like flags in the wind. This physical movement from side to side mirrors his unsettled state of mind. Rocking between directions, he cannot find a fixed place to stand, an image of a people who have no secure position in their own land.

The unanswered questions. As he swings, the child pours out a stream of innocent yet piercing questions: where he comes from, when he will grow up and wear long trousers, and why his mother is regarded as a servant. These childish queries reveal a deep uncertainty about his origins, his future and his social worth. He does not know who he is or where he belongs, which is the heart of the identity crisis.

The crisis of race and place. The most disturbing question is the last, when the child asks why his father was taken away. This sudden shift from innocent play to the harsh reality of a father imprisoned exposes the political roots of the crisis. The black child's confusion about identity is caused by a system that has stripped his family of dignity, freedom and a settled home.

From innocence to painful awareness. The poem moves from the light imagery of play to the dark reality of injustice, suggesting that even in childhood the black South African is forced to confront a wounded, uncertain sense of self.

Through the swinging boy, therefore, Mtshali dramatises the identity crisis of a whole people: dispossessed, disoriented and searching, in a country that denies them a clear and dignified place.

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Though Miss Prism appears only occasionally in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, she is crucial to the plot and to Wilde's satire, and the play could not reach its resolution without her.

She holds the secret of Jack's identity. Miss Prism's greatest importance is that she is the key to the mystery of Jack's birth. Years earlier, when employed as a nursemaid in the household of Lady Bracknell's family, she absent-mindedly placed the baby in a handbag and the manuscript of her three-volume novel in the perambulator, then left the handbag at Victoria Station. This blunder is the very origin of the abandoned baby who grew up to be Jack. When Lady Bracknell recognises her, Miss Prism's confession leads directly to the discovery that Jack is the lost son of Lady Bracknell's sister, Algernon's elder brother, and truly named Ernest. Her revelation resolves the entire plot.

She is an object of satire. As the prim, moralising governess of Cecily, Miss Prism represents the pompous Victorian preacher of respectability and hard work. Yet she once wrote a sentimental novel and confuses her manuscript with a baby, and beneath her severity she nurses a romantic interest in Dr. Chasuble. Wilde uses her to mock the hypocrisy of those who preach earnestness and morality while being comically fallible themselves.

She provides romantic and comic balance. Her mutual, coyly disguised affection for the Reverend Chasuble adds a gentle comic sub-plot among the older characters and rounds off the pattern of pairings at the play's end.

She embodies the theme of names and identity. Because her carelessness caused Jack to be misnamed and mislaid, she is bound up with the play's central concern about the importance, and the arbitrariness, of names and origins.

Miss Prism is therefore important as the agent of the play's resolution, as a target of Wilde's satire on Victorian respectability, and as a source of comic and romantic completion.

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John Donne's The Sun Rising is a dramatic monologue addressed to the sun, and one of its chief pleasures is the way the speaker's mood changes as the poem develops, moving from irritation through mockery to triumphant contentment.

Opening mood: annoyance and rebuke. The poem begins in anger. The lover, lying in bed with his beloved at dawn, is disturbed by the sunlight and scolds the sun as a busy old fool and an unruly, saucy wretch for intruding on the lovers. His tone is impatient and contemptuous. He asks why the sun must call them, demanding that it go instead and trouble late schoolboys, apprentices, court huntsmen and farmers, whose lives are ruled by time.

Middle mood: mockery and defiance. The speaker's mood shifts to confident mockery. He belittles the sun's supposed power, boasting that he could eclipse its beams with a wink, except that he would lose sight of his beloved for a moment. He challenges the sun to travel the world and return to report that the kings and treasures of the East and West Indies are all here, in this very bed. Love, he claims, is not subject to the seasons, days or hours that the sun measures.

Closing mood: triumph and serene joy. The final stanza rises to exultant contentment. The lovers become the whole world: she is all states and he all princes, and nothing else exists. In an act of generous condescension the speaker now pities the aged sun and even invites it to stay, arguing that since the lovers are the world, warming them is the same as warming everywhere. The angry rebuke of the opening has become a calm, self-satisfied welcome.

The poet's mood therefore evolves from irritation at the intruding sun, through witty defiance of its power, to a triumphant peace in which love conquers time and the whole universe shrinks to the lovers' bedroom.

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Romantic love is one of the chief targets of George Bernard Shaw's satire in Arms and the Man. Shaw treats it comically, exposing the false idealism of romantic love and setting against it a practical, honest affection.

Romantic love as illusion. At the start Raina Petkoff and Sergius Saranoff believe themselves joined in a lofty, poetic love, what they grandly call the higher love. They strike heroic poses, speak in exalted language and imagine their devotion to be noble and pure. Shaw presents this romantic idealism as a pretence that cannot survive contact with reality.

The exposure of the pose. The pose collapses almost at once. Sergius, the supposed hero and faithful lover, secretly flirts with the servant Louka behind Raina's back, revealing that his lofty love is hollow. Raina, for her part, is drawn to the fugitive Swiss soldier Bluntschli, the chocolate-cream soldier who hides in her bedroom, and confesses that even she has been playing a part. Shaw shows that the grand romantic love of Raina and Sergius is largely play-acting.

Realistic love as the alternative. Against this false romance Shaw sets a sensible, truthful love. Bluntschli is unromantic, frank and practical, and it is with him, not with the posturing Sergius, that Raina finds a genuine match. Likewise the ambitious servant Louka wins the aristocratic Sergius. Love that is based on truth and mutual understanding is rewarded, while empty romantic idealism is laughed off the stage.

Comic resolution. The play ends with two couples correctly paired according to real feeling rather than romantic pretence: Raina with Bluntschli and Sergius with Louka. The neat comic pairing underlines Shaw's point.

Romantic love is therefore treated with mockery. Shaw ridicules the theatrical, self-deceiving idealism of Raina and Sergius and champions instead a love grounded in honesty and common sense.

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Irony is the very lifeblood of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde uses verbal, dramatic and situational irony throughout to satirise the hypocrisy, snobbery and shallow values of Victorian upper-class society.

Irony in the title and the name Ernest. The whole play turns on the pun in the title. The word earnest means sincere and serious, yet the two heroes, Jack and Algernon, are anything but sincere; they build their romances on lies. Both women declare they can love only a man named Ernest, so the men scramble to be christened Ernest. It is deeply ironic that a name associated with truthfulness is won through elaborate deception, and that Jack turns out, by an accident of birth, to be genuinely named Ernest after all.

Verbal irony and epigram. Wilde fills the dialogue with witty inversions that mean the opposite of conventional wisdom. Characters solemnly utter absurdities as if they were profound truths, for example treating trivial matters like cucumber sandwiches with grave seriousness while treating serious matters like marriage and death with flippancy. This constant reversal mocks the values of the society being portrayed.

Situational irony. The plot is built on ironic reversals. Jack invents a wicked brother called Ernest as an excuse to escape to town, while Algernon invents an invalid friend called Bunbury to escape to the country. The deceptions collide comically when Algernon actually appears as the fictitious Ernest. The revelation that Jack was found as a baby in a handbag at a railway station, and is in fact Algernon's elder brother truly named Ernest, is the crowning irony.

Dramatic irony. The audience often knows more than the characters, for instance that neither man is really named Ernest, which sharpens the comedy of the misunderstandings.

Through this rich web of irony Wilde exposes the pretence beneath respectable Victorian society, showing that its supposed earnestness is itself a comic sham.

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The conflict between Captain Bluntschli and Major Sergius Saranoff in George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man is both military and personal, and Shaw resolves it not through a duel but through comic exposure and sensible rearrangement of the couples.

The nature of the conflict. Bluntschli, the practical Swiss professional soldier, and Sergius, the romantic Bulgarian cavalry officer, are opposites. On the battlefield Bluntschli's realism has already mocked Sergius, for the reckless cavalry charge that made Sergius a supposed hero was in truth a suicidal blunder that only succeeded by accident. Later the conflict becomes personal and romantic: both men are entangled with Raina, and Sergius, discovering that a strange fugitive spent a night in Raina's room, feels his honour insulted and challenges Bluntschli to a duel.

The threatened duel deflated. Shaw resolves the quarrel by puncturing its romantic pretension. When Sergius demands a duel, the unromantic Bluntschli calmly agrees but treats it as a professional matter, offering to fight with a machine gun and pointing out the absurdity of the challenge. The heroic gesture collapses into comedy, and the duel never takes place.

Exposure and honest re-pairing. The deeper resolution comes when the truth is revealed. Sergius has himself been unfaithful, secretly courting the maid Louka, so he has no moral ground for jealousy. Raina admits her attraction to Bluntschli. Once the pretences are stripped away, the tension between the two men dissolves. Sergius, freed from his false engagement, becomes betrothed to Louka, while Raina accepts Bluntschli, who is revealed to be wealthy and eligible.

The conflict is thus resolved through Shaw's characteristic method of deflating romantic illusion. Realism triumphs over false heroism, the men are reconciled, and the play closes with both couples correctly matched, Bluntschli even admiring Sergius's spirit as the rivalry ends in good humour.

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In "Expelled" the poet presents the experience of the black man as a movement from a settled, prosperous past into ruin and humiliation brought by colonial intrusion, and he does this chiefly through images of trade, agriculture, natural disaster and personal loss.

A picture of ordered life before the intrusion. The poet first sets before us a world that was whole and self-sufficient. The dominant image is one of commerce: the black community "had traded in this market competitively perfect," a picture of ordered, peaceful and confident economic life in which the people managed their own affairs and prospered by their own effort. This opening establishes the dignity and security that the black man once enjoyed, so that the loss to come is felt all the more sharply.

Devastation of the economy and the land. That order is then violently overturned. The poet uses stark metaphors of destruction, "cut our ribs," "dried our cows" and "burst the cowshed," to show the black man stripped of the cattle and farming that were the very bulwark of his wealth. Words such as "drought" and "famine" extend the ruin to the natural environment itself, so that both the economy and the land that sustained it are wrecked. The black man is thus cut off from his means of livelihood and his former confidence is broken.

Personal lamentation and disgrace. From this general devastation the poet turns to his own suffering, presenting the black man's experience as a private grief. The hyperbole "my tears flowed to flooded streams" measures the depth of his sorrow, while the biblical allusion to Sodom and Gomorrah suggests total, sweeping destruction and the penury into which he has fallen. The image of debtors and creditors gathered at his "rusty door" is poignant: reduced to poverty, he becomes a laughing stock as the little he has left is auctioned off. What was once a proud, trading people is now a debtor whose door is rusty and whose goods are seized.

Tone and overall effect. The tone moves from the calm assurance of the opening to lamentation and bitter protest, and the poet's own ruined life stands as a testament to the wider fate of the black man under colonialism. By tracing this fall from a "competitively perfect" market to a "rusty door," the poet presents the black man's experience as one of dispossession, humiliation and injustice, in which a whole way of life is expelled and destroyed.