WAEC SSCE - Literature In English - 2012 (Drama & Poetry)

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Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy of manners that uses wit, paradox and farce to satirise the values and pretensions of the Victorian upper class. Beneath its light, laughing surface the play mounts a steady attack on the hypocrisies of the society Wilde lived in.

Satire on marriage. Marriage is treated not as a union of love but as a business transaction governed by wealth and social standing. Lady Bracknell interrogates Jack about his income, property and family connections as though vetting a commercial contract, and dismisses him on learning he was found in a handbag. Her mercenary attitude ridicules the Victorian view of marriage as a means of preserving fortune and rank.

Satire on the aristocracy. Lady Bracknell embodies the arrogance, snobbery and shallow authority of the ruling class. Her absurd pronouncements, delivered with total confidence, expose the emptiness behind aristocratic self-importance. The upper class is shown to be idle, self-indulgent and preoccupied with trivialities.

Satire on earnestness and hypocrisy. The very title puns on being "earnest" (sincere) and being "Ernest" (a name). Both Jack and Algernon lead double lives, inventing fictitious persons (Bunbury and a wicked brother) to escape social obligations. Their "Bunburying" mocks the gap between the respectable public face Victorians presented and the private pleasures they pursued.

Satire on education and gentility. Miss Prism's moralising, Cecily's schooling and the fashionable young women's obsession with the name Ernest ridicule the artificiality of upper-class education and taste. Gwendolen and Cecily value form over substance, wanting the sound of a name rather than the character of a man.

Satire on religion and the church. Canon Chasuble's readiness to rechristen grown men and his coy courtship of Miss Prism reduce the clergy to figures of fashion and convenience rather than faith.

Through epigram and reversal, Wilde turns the audience's laughter into criticism, exposing a society whose respectability is a mask for triviality, greed and hypocrisy. The satire is his central purpose beneath the sparkling comedy.

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John Fletcher's "Upon an Honest Man's Fortune" is a reflective poem that wrestles with the idea of fate and finally rejects the belief that human life is ruled by external forces such as the stars, chance or destiny. Its argument is that the honest, upright man makes his own fortune, and that fate is not a power outside us but a name we give to our own conduct.

Rejecting the tyranny of the stars. The poem opens by dismissing the notion that the heavens govern human affairs. The famous assertion "Man is his own star" declares that a person's destiny is shaped from within, not decreed by the constellations at birth. Fletcher denies astrology and the fatalism it encourages.

Virtue as the shaper of fortune. The poem insists that "the soul that is honest is the only perfect man", and that our own deeds determine our fate. "Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, / our fatal shadows that walk by us still." Fate, then, is nothing but the shadow cast by our own actions; a good man's actions are his good angels, an evil man's his bad. Destiny is thus internalised and moralised.

Fortune has no power over the upright. The honest man is presented as beyond the reach of fickle Fortune. External blows of chance cannot corrupt or overthrow the person whose integrity is firmly rooted within. What the world calls misfortune cannot touch the true worth of the virtuous soul.

Self-reliance and moral courage. The overall theme is one of self-determination. Rather than blaming the stars or bemoaning ill luck, a man should look to his own character, for it is there, and not in the sky, that his fate is written.

The poem therefore treats fate not as a blind external force but as the moral consequence of one's own actions, offering a confident, self-reliant answer to the ancient question of whether destiny or free will governs human life.

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The poem "Myopia" presents the suffering of the ordinary people as the direct consequence of the short-sighted, self-serving vision of those in power. The title itself, meaning near-sightedness, becomes a metaphor for leadership that cannot, or will not, see beyond immediate personal gain to the long-term welfare of the masses.

Poverty and deprivation. The poem dwells on the hardship of the common people, whose basic needs go unmet while their leaders pursue selfish ends. The masses are shown labouring without reward, deprived of the fruits of the nation's wealth, an image of a society in which the many are impoverished so that the few may prosper.

Betrayed hopes. The suffering is sharpened by the sense of promises broken. The people had trusted their leaders to bring progress, but the myopic vision of those in authority leaves the citizens disillusioned. Their expectation of a better life gives way to despair.

Oppression and voicelessness. The masses endure their condition without the power to change it. They are portrayed as helpless victims of a system that silences complaint and ignores their plight, deepening the sense of injustice.

The cause: myopic leadership. The poet insists that this suffering is not accidental but the product of blindness at the top. Leaders who see only their own interests fail to plan for the people, and it is the masses who bear the cost of that failure. The poem thus reads as a protest against bad governance.

Through vivid images of want and neglect, the poem arouses sympathy for the suffering masses and directs blame at the short-sighted rulers whose myopia condemns the many to hardship. Its concern is social justice and the accountability of leadership.

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Gwendolen Fairfax, daughter of Lady Bracknell and cousin of Algernon, is one of the two fashionable young women whose romantic ambitions drive the plot of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. She is at once a comic creation and a vehicle for Wilde's satire of the Victorian upper-class woman.

She loves Jack and insists on the name Ernest. Gwendolen accepts Jack's proposal, but her love is fixed on the name she believes to be his. She declares that her ideal has always been to love someone called Ernest, since the name inspires absolute confidence and produces vibrations. This absurd attachment to a mere name over the man's true character satirises the shallowness and artificiality of fashionable romance.

She is sophisticated and self-assured. Gwendolen is worldly, poised and fond of pronouncing opinions with an air of authority, echoing her formidable mother. She fancies herself modern and independent yet remains entirely a product of her class, ruled by manners, fashion and appearances.

She advances and complicates the plot. Her determination to marry Jack despite Lady Bracknell's refusal, and her decision to follow him to the country, brings her into contact with Cecily. The famous tea-table scene, in which the two women, each believing herself engaged to "Ernest", clash with icy politeness before uniting against the men, is one of the play's comic high points and a key turning of the plot.

She is a foil to Cecily. Gwendolen the town lady and Cecily the country girl mirror one another: both are obsessed with the name Ernest, both are quick to quarrel and quicker to reconcile. Their parallel roles reinforce Wilde's mockery of feminine fashion and sentiment.

She embodies Wilde's satire. Through her paradoxical utterances and misplaced priorities, Gwendolen exposes the trivial values of her world, where surface counts for more than substance. She is delightful comic company and a sharp instrument of the play's social criticism.

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In Kobina Sekyi's The Blinkards, Barrister Onyimdze stands out as the play's chief spokesman for African culture and its most consistent defender against the mania for European imitation. Though he is Western-educated, he uses his learning to affirm rather than despise his heritage, and Sekyi presents him as the voice of reason amid the folly around him.

He is educated yet culturally loyal. Onyimdze has trained as a barrister in England, so no one can accuse him of ignorance of European ways. Precisely because he knows both worlds, his preference for African identity carries weight. He proves that a man may be thoroughly educated in the Western sense and still remain proud of his own people.

He champions African custom and dress. Unlike the Borofosems, who ape English manners, Onyimdze respects and upholds traditional customs, dress and values. He refuses to treat African culture as inferior and demonstrates that native ways are worthy of dignity and preservation.

He defends the vernacular. Against the fashionable insistence on speaking English, even badly, Onyimdze respects the value of the mother tongue and mocks the affectation of those who despise their own language. He sees language as a carrier of identity that ought not to be surrendered.

He is the voice of reason and satire's mouthpiece. Onyimdze functions as the play's raisonneur. Through his sensible comments and dry wit he exposes the absurdity of the "blinkards" who have been dazzled into cultural blindness. He articulates Sekyi's own nationalist argument that blind imitation is folly.

He advocates balance, not rejection. Importantly, Onyimdze does not reject everything European; he is no reactionary. He advocates a sensible synthesis, keeping what is genuinely good in Western learning while remaining rooted in African identity. This moderation makes his defence of culture credible rather than mere prejudice.

In conclusion, Barrister Onyimdze defends African culture by combining Western education with cultural pride, upholding custom and language, exposing the folly of imitation, and advocating a balanced identity. He embodies Sekyi's ideal of the self-respecting African and is the moral centre of the play.

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Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali's "Boy on a Swing" can be read as the record of a child's dawning search for self-identity in apartheid South Africa. The simple act of a boy swinging becomes the frame for a series of questions through which the child gropes towards an understanding of who he is and where he belongs.

The swing as symbol of the searching mind. The boy's body moves "to and fro", into the mist and back, and this rocking motion mirrors the movement of his thoughts as they reach out for answers. The swing suspends him between earth and sky, between childhood innocence and a knowledge he is only beginning to acquire, an image of a mind in search of itself.

The questions of identity. The child asks his mother a chain of innocent yet profound questions: where he comes from, when he will wear long trousers (that is, when he will become a man), and why his father was taken away. These questions move outward from the personal to the social. "Where do I come from?" is the fundamental question of self-origin and identity; "When will I wear long trousers?" is a question about growth into manhood; the last question opens onto a wider, darker world.

From private self to political self. The final question, about the father who "was taken away", shifts the search for identity onto the plane of race and politics. The child begins to sense that his sense of who he is cannot be separated from the injustice of apartheid, which has removed his father. His personal identity is bound up with the fate of his people.

Innocence confronting a harsh world. The naivety of the child's questions makes the reader feel the cruelty of the system all the more keenly. In seeking to know himself, the boy is unknowingly awakening to oppression.

Thus the poem uses a child's ordinary curiosity, framed by the motion of a swing, to dramatise the search for self-identity, a search that in apartheid South Africa inevitably becomes a confrontation with racial injustice.

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In Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu, the agreement between the god Anlugbua, founder-deity of Owu, and his mother, the goddess Lawumi, to punish the allied forces is a pivotal element that gives the tragedy its promise of retribution and expresses the play's central moral judgement on the conduct of war.

The context of the agreement. The allied armies of Ijebu, Ife and their confederates have utterly destroyed Owu, a city Anlugbua himself founded and protected. In their triumph they have not merely defeated the city but committed gross atrocities: massacring the people, enslaving the women, killing the royal child, looting and desecrating the shrines of the gods. It is against these excesses that the divine agreement is directed.

The gods judge the victors, not merely the vanquished. The significance of the agreement is that it turns divine attention onto the conquerors. Victory in war does not confer innocence; the gods weigh the manner of the victory. Because the allied forces have crossed the bounds of decency and offended the gods by their cruelty and sacrilege, they are marked for punishment.

It promises retribution and cosmic balance. By agreeing that the allied forces will suffer, Anlugbua and Lawumi restore moral order. Their pact foreshadows the disasters that will overtake the victorious armies on their return, mirroring the way the triumphant Greeks in the original myth are scattered and destroyed. The agreement assures the audience that the crimes will not go unanswered.

It comforts the suffering women, if only obliquely. Though it cannot undo the women's losses, the divine resolve gives meaning to their suffering by promising that their oppressors will not escape justice, so that the tragedy is not merely one of helpless victimhood.

It carries Osofisan's anti-war and political message. The pact universalises the warning: any power that wages war with unchecked brutality invites its own ruin. Written with modern conflicts in view, the agreement is Osofisan's caution to conquerors of every age that atrocity breeds nemesis.

In conclusion, the agreement between Anlugbua and Lawumi to punish the allied forces is significant as an act of divine justice that condemns the atrocities of the victors, promises retribution and cosmic balance, and voices Osofisan's enduring warning against the brutality of war.

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John Donne's "The Sunne Rising" is rich in vivid and often extravagant imagery through which the poet celebrates the supremacy of love. The lovers' bedroom becomes the whole world, and the sun is reduced to a mere servant, as Donne uses striking images to exalt his love above kings, seasons and the heavens.

Personification of the sun. The central image is the sun addressed as a living intruder, a "busy old fool" and "unruly" pedant who peeps through curtains and disturbs the lovers. By scolding the sun as a meddlesome old man, Donne belittles the greatest of natural bodies and asserts that love answers to no external timetable of "hours, days, months".

Imagery of kingship and empire. The lover claims that all the world's riches and rulers are contained in the bed. "She is all states, and all princes I"; the beloved is every kingdom and the poet every monarch. The spices and mines of the Indies, and the kings the sun shines on, are all present in the one room. This hyperbolic imagery makes the lovers a self-sufficient world that contains and outshines all real empires.

Cosmic and microcosmic imagery. The bedroom is transformed into a microcosm of the universe: "This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere". The room becomes the centre of creation around which the sun must revolve, reversing the ordinary relation between the vast heavens and the small chamber.

Imagery of light and blindness. Donne toys with the sun's beams, boasting he could eclipse them with a wink but will not, lest he lose sight of his beloved. Light imagery is used to argue that the beloved's eyes could blind the sun itself.

Through these bold, witty and exaggerated images, characteristic of metaphysical poetry, Donne compresses the entire world into the lovers' room and elevates private love above time, royalty and the cosmos.

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In Kobina Sekyi's The Blinkards, the cosmopolitan club members are among the sharpest targets of the playwright's satire. Their comportment, their manners, speech and conduct, embodies the affected, imitative elite whose blindness to their own culture the play condemns.

Slavish imitation of European manners. The club members model their behaviour on English high society. They adopt European dress, etiquette, dances and forms of greeting, striving to appear as cultivated as their colonial masters. Their comportment is a performance of Englishness rather than a genuine expression of their own identity.

Affected and pretentious speech. They pride themselves on speaking English, often stilted or broken, and look down on the vernacular. Their conversation is full of pretension and social posturing, and Sekyi mocks the way they mangle the language they are so eager to flaunt.

Snobbery and class consciousness. The club is a bastion of snobbery. Its members regard themselves as superior to ordinary people who keep to native ways, and they measure prestige by how thoroughly one has been Anglicised. Their comportment is marked by condescension and a craving for social status.

Superficiality and hollow display. Their gatherings are concerned with appearance, fashion and show rather than substance. Beneath the polished manners lies emptiness, for their refinement is borrowed and imitative. Sekyi exposes the shallowness of a culture built on mimicry.

Cultural blindness. Above all, the club members are "blinkards," blinded by colonial dazzle to the worth of their own heritage. Their comportment illustrates the central theme of the play: that the educated elite have surrendered their identity in exchange for a hollow imitation of Europe.

Satiric function. By presenting the club members as figures of comedy and ridicule, Sekyi holds their comportment up for the audience's laughter and criticism, using them to drive home his nationalist warning against cultural self-contempt.

In conclusion, the comportment of the cosmopolitan club members is imitative, pretentious, snobbish and superficial. Through their affected conduct Sekyi satirises the colonial elite and condemns the blind imitation of European ways at the expense of authentic African identity.

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In Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu, Gesinde is the herald or messenger of the victorious allied forces, the counterpart of Talthybius in Euripides' The Trojan Women. Although he is an agent of the conquerors, Gesinde is one of the chief engines of the plot: it is largely through him that the fates of the captive women of Owu are announced, and each of his entrances launches a fresh episode of the tragedy.

He is the bearer of the conquerors' decisions. Gesinde arrives repeatedly among the women to announce how the allied leaders have disposed of them. Erelu herself calls him a messenger of doom, for whenever he appears the women expect the worst. He is the channel between the unseen victors and the suffering captives, so that each turn of the plot and each new sorrow is delivered through his mouth.

He announces the individual fates that structure the play. The action advances through a series of announcements about particular women, and Gesinde is the one who conveys them: that Erelu is to be handed over, and that her daughters and the other women are to be carried off as slaves and concubines. Each of these declarations triggers a fresh confrontation and lament, giving the episodic play its forward movement.

He delivers, and even executes, the cruellest decree. It is Gesinde who breaks the most terrible news of all, the order that the royal child must die so that no heir of Owu survives to seek revenge, and it is he who carries out the killing of Adumaadan's son, the baby Aderogun. Through this he drives the plot to its most harrowing point and exposes the ruthlessness of the victors.

He is a reluctant and sympathetic instrument. Osofisan gives Gesinde a conscience. Though he must obey his master, he is emotional and defensive, disowning responsibility for the atrocities he announces: “I am only a messenger, just a borrowed mouth.” He sheds tears at the sight of Adumaadan paying her last respects to her slain son, and, moved with pity, he volunteers to dig a grave and bury the baby Aderogun himself. This complexity deepens the drama, for the very bearer of doom is troubled by the cruelty, and the play's moral vision is broadened beyond a simple opposition of victor and victim.

He supplies information, continuity and even a touch of irony. As a messenger figure Gesinde keeps the audience informed of events happening off-stage among the conquerors, linking the world of the defeated women to the decisions of the triumphant army and bridging the play's separate episodes. He also has a gossiping, ironic streak: when Maye agrees to take back his unfaithful wife Iyunloye, Gesinde observes that “beauty has conquered again, as before,” and he callously announces Iyunloye's triumph to the women in the midst of their agony, sharpening the play's bitter contrast between her fortune and their ruin.

Conclusion. Gesinde contributes to the development of the plot as the loyal herald who announces the fates of the women, triggers each successive episode, delivers and even carries out the play's most terrible decree, and, through his reluctant sympathy and ironic commentary, enriches its moral texture. Without him the news that drives the tragedy could not reach the stage, and the plot of Women of Owu would lose the very voice that sets its sorrows in motion.

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In George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man, Louka the maidservant and Raina the mistress are deliberately contrasted women. Their differences of class, temperament and conduct allow Shaw to satirise social pretension and to show that worth is not determined by birth.

Social class. Raina is the daughter of the wealthy Petkoff family, a well-born young lady raised in comfort and privilege. Louka is a servant in that household, of humble origin. This gulf of class is the foundation of their contrast and of the social comedy Shaw builds upon it.

Ambition. Louka is fiercely ambitious and determined to rise above her station. She refuses to accept that her low birth should confine her and openly aims to marry into the upper class, eventually winning Sergius. Raina, already privileged, has no such need to climb and takes her position for granted.

Honesty and pose. Raina, at least at first, is affected and romantic, cultivating a "noble attitude" and a false ideal of heroism and higher love. Louka, by contrast, is frank, shrewd and clear-sighted; she sees through pretence, including Sergius's, and speaks plain truths that the genteel characters avoid. Shaw uses Louka's realism to expose Raina's posing.

Courage and boldness. Louka is bold, defiant and daring, willing to challenge her social superiors and to pursue Sergius against convention. Raina is more sheltered and conventional, though she too grows bolder and more honest as the play proceeds.

Development and outcome. Both women shed illusions by the close. Raina abandons her romantic pretence and accepts the realistic Bluntschli, while Louka secures Sergius and rises in status. Their parallel yet contrasting fates underline Shaw's point that intelligence, honesty and force of character matter more than rank.

Shaw's satiric purpose. Through the contrast, Shaw ridicules the class snobbery of the Petkoffs and celebrates the spirited, self-made Louka, suggesting that the servant's shrewd realism is in some ways superior to her mistress's inherited refinement.

In conclusion, Louka and Raina differ in class, ambition, honesty and boldness. Raina begins as the affected, privileged romantic and Louka as the frank, ambitious realist, and through their differences Shaw attacks social pretension and affirms that character outweighs birth.

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In the third act of Arms and the Man, set in the library that opens onto the garden of the Petkoff house, Catherine displays a talent for smooth, self-possessed deceit that marks her out as an accomplished liar. Her lies are made necessary by the return of Captain Bluntschli, the Swiss fugitive whom she and Raina had sheltered and helped to escape during the war. To protect the family's reputation, and Raina's, Catherine must keep her husband, Major Petkoff, and Sergius from learning the truth.

She lies with perfect composure. Where Raina blushes, hesitates and nearly betrays herself, Catherine remains cool and collected. She never loses her nerve, answering awkward questions promptly and steadily so that no gap or stammer exposes the deception. Her calm is itself a form of concealment, for a guilty conscience would show in agitation.

She improvises quickly. When Petkoff puzzles over the mysterious business of the coat and the strange soldier who was fed and hidden, Catherine invents ready explanations and diverts the conversation before it can settle on the dangerous subject. She thinks faster than her husband and manages the flow of talk to steer it away from Raina's room.

She coaches and shields Raina. Catherine watches her daughter anxiously and moves in to cover for her whenever Raina is on the point of exposure, taking control of the situation like a practised conspirator. She treats deception as a domestic duty in the interest of respectability.

She exploits her husband's simplicity. Petkoff is trusting and slow-witted, and Catherine manipulates his ignorance without scruple, presenting falsehoods as though they were plain fact. Her superiority in cunning allows her lies to pass unquestioned.

Through her steady nerve, quick invention and easy manipulation of the honest Major, Shaw reveals Catherine as a woman for whom lying is second nature. The garden scene thus exposes the gap between the family's outward gentility and the deceit that props it up, one of Shaw's satirical thrusts at romantic and social pretension.