WAEC SSCE - Literature In English - 2021 (Drama & Poetry)

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The title of August Wilson's play Fences is highly appropriate, for the fence is both a literal object built on stage and a rich symbol that gathers up the play's central themes.

The literal fence

• Throughout the action Troy and Cory are slowly building a wooden fence around the Maxson yard, a task Rose has asked for.
• The unfinished fence is a constant physical presence, and the labour of building it frames the family's quarrels and conversations.

Fences that keep people in (love and protection)

• Bono observes that some people build fences to keep the ones they love close. Rose wants the fence because she is trying to hold her family together and keep her loved ones safe within it.
• The fence therefore stands for Rose's love and her wish to protect husband and son from a hostile world.

Fences that keep people out

• The fence also symbolises the barriers Troy builds against death. He boasts that he has fenced Death out of his yard and dares him to come.
• It suggests the defences people raise against danger, disappointment and mortality.

Fences of separation and division

• The fence marks the emotional walls that grow up between the characters: between Troy and Cory, whom he drives away, and between Troy and Rose after his betrayal.
• It reflects the racial barriers of segregated America that fenced black men like Troy out of opportunity, such as the colour bar that kept him out of professional baseball.

Irony of completion

• The fence is finished only late, by which time Troy's own fences have shut out his son and wounded his wife. The completed fence encloses a broken family.

Conclusion

The title Fences is apt because the fence operates on every level of the play: as a real structure, as a sign of love and protection, as a defence against death, and as an image of the social and emotional barriers that divide people. The single image thus unifies the whole drama.

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In August Wilson's Fences, Raynell is the daughter born to Troy Maxson by his mistress Alberta, who dies giving birth to her. Although she appears only late in the play, Raynell makes an important contribution to its plot and meaning.

Fruit of Troy's infidelity

• Raynell's birth is the direct consequence of Troy's affair with Alberta. Her arrival forces Troy to confess his adultery and shatters his marriage to Rose.
• Troy brings the motherless baby home, and his plea, that she is innocent and needs care, tests Rose's charity.

Rose's redemption and growth

• Rose agrees to raise Raynell as her own, saying the child is fatherless and womanless but not so; the baby will have a mother.
• In taking in Raynell, Rose shows generosity and strength, and her decision marks the reordering of the household on her own terms rather than Troy's.

Symbol of innocence and new life

• Raynell represents fresh, blameless life growing out of Troy's sin, a sign of hope and continuance after his failures.
• Her small garden and her growing up embody the idea that new life carries on despite the fences and disappointments of the older generation.

Reconciliation in the final scene

• Years later, on the day of Troy's funeral, Raynell meets her half-brother Cory, who has refused to attend.
• Together the two children sing the old blues song about Troy's dog "Blue" that their father used to sing. This shared song softens Cory's bitterness and helps reconcile him to his father's memory.
• Raynell thus becomes the link between the past and the future and the means by which the family finds a measure of peace.

Conclusion

Though a minor character, Raynell drives key developments: she exposes Troy's betrayal, occasions Rose's noble decision, symbolises innocent new life, and finally helps bring about the reconciliation and healing with which the play closes.

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Gerard Manley Hopkins's Binsey Poplars mourns a row of aspen trees felled beside the river at Binsey. The poem's grief is intensified by its rich sound patterning, and alliteration, assonance and repetition are central to its music and meaning.

Alliteration

• Hopkins repeats initial consonants to bind lines and imitate action, as in the felling of the trees: All felled, felled, are all felled, where the recurring f falls like the axe.
• Phrases such as Of a fresh and following folded rank and wind-wandering weed-winding bank use clustered f and w sounds to convey the graceful order of the trees and the gentle motion of the riverbank.
• The alliteration knits the verse tightly together and gives it an incantatory, lamenting quality.

Assonance

• Repeated vowel sounds enrich the texture, as in the long, mournful vowels of quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, where the echoing sounds slow the line and deepen the elegiac tone.
• The recurring open and long vowels sustain the sorrowful, singing movement that suits an elegy for the lost trees.

Repetition

• Whole words and phrases are repeated for emphasis and emotional force: felled, felled, are all felled drives home the totality of the loss.
• The refrain-like lines Since country is so tender / To touch, her being so slender and the repeated strokes of havoc stress how easily and how completely nature can be destroyed.
• The reiteration of hew and delve, and the warning that ten or twelve / Strokes of havoc unselve / The sweet especial scene, hammers home the theme that a few careless blows can undo an irreplaceable beauty.

Combined effect

• Together these devices create Hopkins's characteristic "sprung rhythm" and dense musicality.
• The sound patterns enact the poem's grief, making the reader hear the rhythmic fall of the axe and feel the tender fragility of the natural world that human carelessness destroys.

Conclusion

Alliteration, assonance and repetition are not ornaments but the very heart of Binsey Poplars. They give the elegy its haunting music and force home its lament that once nature's delicate beauty is hewn down, it can never be restored.

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In Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel, the contest for the village beauty Sidi is fought between the young schoolteacher Lakunle and the old chief Baroka, the "Lion" of Ilujinle. Lakunle loses her for several linked reasons.

His refusal to pay the bride-price

• Sidi insists on the bride-price as proof that she is a virgin and a woman of honour. Lakunle, calling the custom savage and out of date, refuses to pay it.
• To Sidi this refusal looks like meanness or an attempt to cheat her of her dignity, so she will not marry him on his terms.

His empty modern talk

• Lakunle is full of borrowed Western ideas and grand speeches about progress, magazines, cars and city life, but he does nothing practical and cannot back his words with action.
• His half-baked civilisation makes him seem foolish and pompous rather than admirable, and Sidi loses respect for him.

His timidity and weakness

• Lakunle is hesitant, cowardly and physically feeble. He talks of love but shrinks from decisive action.

Baroka's cunning

• Baroka, though old, is shrewd and experienced. He spreads a rumour that he has become impotent, knowing it will reach the proud Sidi.
• Curious and feeling safe, Sidi visits the palace to mock him. There Baroka flatters her, plays on her vanity with talk of putting her image on a postage stamp, and finally seduces her.
• Once Sidi has lost her virginity to Baroka, the bride-price question is settled and she chooses the virile, clever "Lion" over the ineffectual teacher.

Conclusion

Lakunle loses Sidi because his shallow, undigested modernity, his refusal to honour tradition by paying the bride-price, and his personal weakness make him no match for the wily, self-assured Baroka. The play thus favours rooted native wisdom over borrowed, empty Westernisation.

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Agostinho Neto's The Grieved Lands (also rendered The Grieved Lands of Africa) is a poem of protest and hope. It shows Africa as a land that has suffered deep and repeated pain under slavery and colonialism, yet has refused to die and continues to survive and rise.

How Africa suffered

• The very title, "grieved lands", presents the whole continent as wounded and mourning, sorrow spread across the land itself.
• The poem recalls the historical injuries of Africa: the violence of slavery, the chains and the auction-block, and the humiliations of colonial conquest.
• Neto piles up references to the pain endured, the sweat, blood and tears of the African people exploited and oppressed by foreign masters.
• The land is pictured as watered by suffering, its peoples degraded and their dignity trampled over long centuries.

How Africa survives still

• Against this catalogue of grief the poem insists, through emphatic repetition, that the grieved lands are "rising", "growing" and coming to life again.
• The repeated affirmation that the lands rise conveys defiance and unquenchable vitality: suffering has bruised Africa but not destroyed it.
• Images of dawn, growth and awakening suggest new life, renewal and the coming of freedom after the long night of oppression.
• The endurance of the people, their refusal to be broken, becomes proof that Africa lives on and moves towards liberation.

Technique that carries the theme

• Neto uses insistent repetition and parallelism to hammer home both the depth of the suffering and the certainty of the survival.
• The tone shifts from grief to triumphant hope, mirroring Africa's passage from bondage towards resurgence.

Conclusion

In The Grieved Lands, Neto records the historic agony of slavery and colonialism written into the very soil of Africa, but he transforms that grief into a song of survival. The grieved lands, though deeply wounded, rise, grow and live still, embodying the poet's faith in Africa's endurance and eventual freedom.

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Love and marriage form the central theme of Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel. The play examines competing attitudes to courtship, marriage customs and the union of the sexes, set against the wider clash between tradition and modernity in the village of Ilujinle.

Rival views of marriage

• Lakunle's romantic, Western view. The schoolteacher preaches a modern, companionate marriage: no bride-price, a wife as an equal partner, courtship with kisses, and city-style romance drawn from magazines. Yet his ideas are shallow and unworkable in the village.
• Sidi's traditional pride. Sidi values the bride-price as proof of her worth and virginity. She will not surrender her honour for Lakunle's fine words and demands that custom be respected.
• Baroka's polygamous tradition. The Bale sees marriage as the privilege of the strong man. He already has many wives and a favourite, Sadiku, and he pursues Sidi as another jewel for his household.

The contest for Sidi

• The plot is a courtship contest in which love is bound up with pride, custom and cunning rather than pure affection.
• Baroka wins Sidi by guile, and their union celebrates virility and native tradition; Lakunle's bookish romance is defeated.

The bride-price and custom

• The dispute over the bride-price shows how marriage in the play is a social and communal matter, governed by custom, not merely a private feeling between two people.

Comment on the theme

• Soyinka treats love and marriage with comedy and satire. He mocks Lakunle's undigested modernity while affirming the vitality of tradition through Baroka.
• The closing marriage dance and Sadiku's celebration of fertility present marriage as a communal, life-affirming institution rooted in African custom.

Conclusion

Through the rivalry of Lakunle and Baroka for Sidi, the play stages three attitudes to love and marriage, romantic-modern, proud-traditional and shrewdly polygamous, and finally endorses rooted native custom over borrowed Western romance.