St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)
End Semester Examination – Sept / Oct. 2014
BBM – I Semester
ADDITIONAL ENGLISH
Duration: 3 Hours Max. Marks: 100
Note: Read the questions carefully before answering.
Do not exceed the paragraph limit.
Each paragraph should contain at least four sentences.
SECTION – A
- Answer any two in about three paragraphs each. (2 x 15 = 30)
- Comment on any two ideas that impressed you in the essay ‘A Free Man’s Worship’. Why do you think the essay is titled as ‘A Free Man’s Worship’?
- In Mario Vargas Llossa’s essay ‘The Premature Obituary of the Book. Why Literature?’ he expresses concern about the dwindling readership of literature. Do you think his concern is justified? Would it concern you personally if the readership of literature were really diminishing?
- Both Harriet Jacobs and Siddalingaiah have different styles of autobiographical writing. If one adopts a slightly serious tone the other has a very humorous way of looking at the world. What do you think are the purposes of writers adopting such varied writing styles? Which style interests you more and why?
- Answer in about four paragraphs. (1 x 20 = 20)
- Both Romila Thapar and Bertrand Russell seem to be engaged deeply with history. If one talks about the history of a specific place the other talks about the entire history of human beings. And both are interested in the debate between reason and faith. What is your understanding of reason and faith? How have the discussions and readings done in the classroom helped you in exploring the debate further?
SECTION – B
Read the below extract from the autobiography of the famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and answer the questions.
MY FIRST POEM
Now I am going to tell you a story about birds. In Lake Budi, swans were brutally hunted. They were stalked quietly in boats and then, rowing faster, faster . . . Swans, like the albatross, take to the air clumsily, they have to make a run, skimming the water. They lift their huge wings heavily, and so were easily caught, and finished off with sticks.
Someone brought me a swan that was half dead. It was one of those magnificent birds I have not seen again anywhere in the world, a black-necked swan. A snowy vessel with its slender neck looking as if squeezed into a black silk stocking, its beak an orange color and its eyes red.
This happened at the seaside, in Puerto Saavedra, Imperial del Sur.
It was almost dead when they gave it to me. I bathed its wounds and stuffed bits of bread and fish down its throat. It threw up everything. But it recovered from its injuries gradually and began to realize that I was its friend. And I began to realize that homesickness was killing it. So I went down the streets to the river, with the heavy bird in my arms. It swam a little way, close by. I wanted it to fish and showed it the pebbles on the bottom, the sand the silver fish of the south went gliding over. But its sad eyes wandered off into the distance.
I carried it to the river and back to my house every day for more than twenty days. The swan was almost as tall as I. One afternoon it seemed dreamier; it swam near me but wasn’t entertained by my ruses for trying to teach it how to fish again. It was very still and I picked it up in my arms to take it home. But when I held it up to my breast, I felt a ribbon unrolling, and something like a black arm brushed my face. It was the long, sinuous neck falling. That’s how I found out that swans don’t sing when they die.
Summer is like fire in Cauti’n. It scorches the sky and the wheat. The land would like to shake off its lethargy. The houses are not prepared for summer, just as they were not prepared for winter. I wander off into the countryside and I walk, walk, walk. I become lost on Nielol Hill. I am alone, my pocket filled with beetles. In a box I carry a hairy spider I just caught. Overhead, the sky can’t be seen. The forest is always damp, my feet slip. Suddenly a bird cries out, it’s the ghostly cry of the chucao bird. A chill of warning creeps upward from my feet. The copihues, drops of blood, can barely be made out. I am only a tiny creature under the giant ferns. A ringdove flies right past my mouth, with a snapping sound of wings. Higher up, other birds laugh harshly, mocking me. I have trouble finding my way back. It’s late now.
My father is not here yet. He will be back at three or four in the morning. I go upstairs to my room. I read Salgari. The rain pours down like a waterfall. In less than no time, night and the rain cover the whole world. I am alone, writing poems in my math notebook. I am up very early the next morning. The plums are green. I charge up the slopes. I carry a little packet of salt with me. I climb a tree, make myself comfortable, bite a little chunk out of a plum carefully, and dip the plum into the salt. I eat it.
And I repeat this, up to one hundred plums. I know I’m over doing it.
Our other house burned down, and this new one is filled with mystery. I climb up on the fence and I watch for the neighbors. There is no one around. I lift up some logs. Nothing but a few measly spiders. The toilet is at the back of the place. The trees next to it have caterpillars. The almond trees display their fruit covered with white down. I know how to catch bumblebees without harming them, with a handkerchief. I keep them captive for a little while and hold them up to my ears. What a beautiful buzz!
How lonely a small boy poet, dressed in black, feels on the vast and terrifying frontier wilderness! Little by little, life and books give me glimpses of overwhelming mysteries. I can’t forget what I read last night: in faraway Malaysia, Sandokan and his friends survived on breadfruit.
I don’t like Buffalo Bill, because he kills Indians. But he’s such a good cowpuncher! The plains and the cone-shaped tepees of the redskins are so beautiful! I have often been asked when I wrote my first poem, when poetry was born in me. I’ll try to remember. Once, far back in my childhood, when I had barely learned to read, I felt an intense emotion and set down a few words, half rhymed but strange to me, different from everyday language. Overcome by a deep anxiety, something I had not experienced before, a kind of anguish and sadness, I wrote them neatly on a piece of paper. It was a poem to my mother, that is, to the one I knew, the angelic stepmother whose gentle shadow watched over my childhood. I had no way at all of judging my first composition, which I took to my parents. They were in the dining room, immersed in one of those hushed conversations that, more than a river, separate the world of children and the world of grownups. Still trembling after this first visit from the muse, I held out to them the paper with the lines of verse. My father took it absentmindedly, read it absentmindedly, and returned it to me absentmindedly, saying: “Where did you copy this from?” Then he went on talking to my mother in a lowered voice about his important and remote affairs.
That, I seem to remember, was how my first poem was born, and that was how I had my first sample of irresponsible literary criticism.
And all the while I was moving in the world of knowing, on the turbulent river of books, like a solitary navigator. My appetite for reading did not let up day or night. On the coast, in the tiny town of Puert o Saavedra, I found a public library and an old poet, Don August O Winter, who was impressed by my literary voracity. “Have you read them already?” he would say to me, handing me a new Vargas Vila, an Ibsen, a Rocambole. I gobbled up everything, indiscriminately, like an ostrich.
Around this time, a tall lady who wore long long dresses and flat shoes came to Temuco. She was the new principal of the girls’ school. She was from our southernmost city, from Magellan’s snows. Her name was Gabriel a Mistral. I used to watch her passing through the streets of my home town, with her sweeping dresses, and I was scared of her. But when I was taken to visit her, I found her to be very gracious. In her dark face, as Indian as a lovely Araucanian pitcher, her very white teeth flashed in a full, generous smile that lit up the room.
I was too young to be her friend, and too shy and taken up with myself. I saw her only a few times, but I always went away with some books she gave me. They were invariably Russian novels, which she considered the most extraordinary thing in world literature. I can say that Gabriela introduced me to the dark and terrifying vision of the Russian novelists and that Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov soon occupied a special place deep within me. They are with me still.
- Answer any two in about three or four paragraphs each (2 x15 = 30)
- The extract given above is titled ‘My First Poem’, but Neruda begins the section with the sentence ‘Now I am going to tell you a story about birds’ and goes on to narrate the story of him trying to rescue a bird. Why do you think he narrates this story in a section where he is supposed to talk about his first poem? Also comment the way in which the story is narrated.
- The ‘wilderness’ that Neruda describes seems to have had a profound impact on him. Identify any two instances from the above passage where he was bewildered by the wilderness and relate it with your own experience of wilderness.
- Neruda begins to narrate the story of his first poem at the end of the section and almost in an unexpected way. Do you think there is any relation at all to the stories of bird rescue, plum eating and loneliness to the story of his first poem? Comment on the entire structure of the extract.
- Solitude led Pablo Neruda to read voraciously and to write poems. What is your relationship with solitude? Narrate an experience of solitude which you would like to share with others.
- Read the poem by Pablo Neruda and answer the question in about four paragraphs. (1 x 20 = 20)
Poetry
And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
- Both the extract and the poem are about writing a poem by the same person. How different or similar are they, in terms of the use of literary devices, in narrating the same phenomenon of writing a poem? Also comment on the kind of impression that both the prose and the poem created on you.
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