THE POEM
SECTION A: UNSEEN POEM
- Read the poem below and answer the questions that follow
There was a great commotion in the memorial park last night
skeletons in altercation: 'twas grisly sight!
Said one, 'I'll have you know, Sir, though in this lev'lin' place.
You're not my equal here, Sir, you're of a different race.
Prevent your n***** worms, man, from capering round my bones
I'll never fester with you here, man, our skins were different tones.'
There was a traffic hold-up to cross the deadly Styx
because the black and white spooks they disagreed to mix.
The white ones wanted first class, the black poor Charon could not
See.
'I'll take ye all to Hades,' he said, 'I'll tell ye I'm in doubt
But when Old Nick comes back from lunch, I'm sure he'll sort you out.'
There was a great dissention 'midst t'angels up in heaven
because an equal brand of crown had to them all been given.
The white ones said, 'By right of race we should have crowns of gold.
While crowns for native all should be quite of a different mould.
They shall be made to doff their crowns when one of us goes by
And if they don't we'll take our crowns and doff them in the eye.'
There was a grand palaver in the regions of the pit
Barbed tails and horns and cloven hoofs inextricably mixt
And when old Satan asked the cause, the clamour that arose
Was 'nuff to make the blighter glad like the incense to his nose.
The white fiends then objected to being brimstoned with the black
Till Satan lost his dander and threatened them the sack.
QUESTIONS
SECTION A: UNSEEN POEM (30 Marks)
a. What is the subject matter of this poem?
b. What is the tone of the poem?
c. What do you consider to be the meanings of the following words: i. Spooks ii. Old Nick iii. to doff iv. nuff v. blighter vi. dander
d. Each stanza is set in a different place. What are the four scenes in the poem?
e. Comment on the style of this poem.
f. Suggest an appropriate title to the poem.
SECTION B: NON-AFRICAN POETRY (25 Marks — Answer ONE question)
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Poems
2. "Hopkins though wrote in the mid-nineteenth century, his poetry appears so modernist that some critics have referred to him as one of the forefathers of Modernist Poetry." With appropriate examples from four poems, expatiate on this view.
3. With close reference to four poems, comment on the distinctive style of Hopkins in his Selected Poems.
Ezra Pound: Selected Poems
4. Discuss Ezra Pound's views on Replacement in his Selected Poems.
5. With appropriate examples from four poems, discuss Ezra Pound's projection of life in the 20th Century.
SECTION C: AFRICAN POETRY (25 Marks — Answer ONE question)
Isidore Diala: The Lure of Ash
6. Discuss Isidore Diala's distinguishing stylistic features in The Lure of Ash. Refer to at least four poems.
7. Drawing examples from the poems, what do you consider to be the major preoccupation of Isidore Diala in the three phases he titled: The Hues of Ash, The Swell of Ash, and The Trail of Ash?
Antjie Krog: Body Bereft
8. What do you consider to be the preoccupation of Antjie Krog in Body Bereft?
9. Comment on Antjie Krog's style in Body Bereft. Refer to at least four poems.
MODEL ANSWERS
SECTION A: THE UNSEEN POEM
a. Subject matter
The poem satirises racial segregation by imagining that it survives death itself. Skeletons in a graveyard, souls waiting to cross the River Styx, angels in heaven, and devils in hell are all shown squabbling over racial "colour bars" — first-class versus economy passage, separate crowns, separate treatment. The subject is the absurdity and irrationality of racism: transplanting apartheid-style prejudice into settings where it has no logical place (the afterlife, where all are equally dead, equally souls, or equally damned) exposes how baseless the prejudice is.
b. Tone
Satirical and mock-serious, shifting between dark comedy and biting irony. The poet uses a light, almost nursery-rhyme sing-song register to narrate something as grim as racial hatred, and the mismatch between playful form and ugly content produces the satire. There's also exasperation, captured in Satan's own loss of patience with the demands of the white spirits — even hell finds the prejudice tiresome.
c. Word meanings
i. Spooks — informal/dialect word for ghosts or spirits; the poet exploits its double meaning, since the word was also historically used as a racial slur, so it carries the poem's racial theme.
ii. Old Nick — a traditional nickname for the Devil/Satan.
iii. To doff — to take off or remove (originally of a hat, as a mark of respect).
iv. Nuff — dialect spelling/pronunciation of "enough."
v. Blighter — an informal, mildly contemptuous term for a troublesome or objectionable person.
vi. Dander — one's temper; "to lose one's dander" means to lose patience or grow angry.
d. The four scenes
- The memorial park/graveyard, where skeletons argue over their bones mixing.
- The crossing of the River Styx with Charon, where a "colour bar" causes a hold-up.
- Heaven, where angels dispute over equal distribution of golden crowns.
- Hell/the pit, where devils quarrel before Satan over who must be punished alongside whom.
e. Style
Ballad-like stanzas with regular rhyme and a bouncy rhythm, creating ironic distance from the grim subject. Colloquial/dialect diction ("nuff," "blighter," "dander," "lev'lin'") gives a folk, storytelling quality. The poet uses personification and an extended conceit — mapping earthly segregation onto four supernatural settings — plus dramatic dialogue in which the prejudiced characters condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Dark humour and irony pervade the piece, especially in Satan's own impatience with racism.
f. Suggested title
"Colour Bar in the Hereafter" (alternatives: "Segregation Beyond the Grave," "No Rest for Racists") — a title should signal both the afterlife setting and the racial satire.
SECTION B: NON-AFRICAN POETRY
Q2. Hopkins as a forefather of Modernist poetry
Although Hopkins wrote in the mid-nineteenth century (composed 1875–89, published posthumously 1918), his technical innovations anticipate Modernism's break from Victorian regularity.
- Sprung rhythm: "The Windhover" counts stresses rather than syllables, producing a jagged music Modernists like Eliot and Pound later prized over metrical regularity.
- Compressed, fractured syntax: "Pied Beauty" packs its praise of "dappled things" into inverted, elliptical clauses that resist easy paraphrase.
- Neologism and compounding: "God's Grandeur" coins compressed compounds ("shining from shook foil") that compact meaning much as Pound's Imagist economy later would.
- Psychological interiority and despair: the "terrible sonnets," e.g. "No worst, there is none," plunge into raw, fragmented inner anguish ("Comforter, where, where is your comforting?"), prefiguring the alienation central to Modernist poetry (Eliot's "Prufrock").
Hopkins keeps the outward shell of traditional form (the sonnet) while destabilising its inner workings — the tension later Modernists exploited, justifying his status as a forefather.
Q3. Hopkins's distinctive style
- Sprung rhythm — stress-timed rather than syllable-timed metre ("The Windhover").
- Inscape and instress — Hopkins's coined terms for a thing's unique inner design and the energy revealing it ("Pied Beauty," "As Kingfishers Catch Fire").
- Dense alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme ("God's Grandeur": "It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed").
- Compound and invented diction, compressing images into coined words.
- Religious intensity — natural observation fused with devotional feeling, whether praise ("Pied Beauty") or spiritual crisis ("No worst, there is none").
Q4. Pound's views on Replacement
Pound's central project was replacing worn-out Romantic/Victorian conventions — ornamental diction, excess sentiment, loose abstraction — with a disciplined new poetics ("make it new").
- Diction: "A Pact" addresses Whitman directly, ending an old quarrel and proposing a leaner American poetics replace the old expansive free verse.
- Form and image: "In a Station of the Metro" replaces discursive description with a single compressed image, showing his belief that precision should replace ornamentation.
- Culture and value: "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" stages the replacement of art-for-art's-sake aestheticism and a civilisation that sacrificed its youth in war for commercial gain, demanding renewed cultural seriousness.
"Replacement" in Pound is both stylistic and civilisational — old, decayed values must give way to renewed clarity and integrity in art and society.
Q5. Pound's projection of life in the 20th century
- Fragmentation and disillusionment: "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" surveys a post-war world of shattered ideals — youth sent to die "pro patria" for a commercially corrupt cause.
- Alienation in the modern city: "In a Station of the Metro" reduces the individual to a ghostly "apparition" among an anonymous crowd.
- Critique of materialism and usury: Pound's attack on commercial greed (seeded in Mauberley, explicit in the later Cantos) projects a century corrupted by finance at the expense of art and human value.
- Exile and cultural rootlessness: "The Return" evokes a diminished modern world where old vigour returns only weakly.
Overall, Pound projects the century as an age of disillusionment, cultural decay, and impersonal urban alienation.
SECTION C: AFRICAN POETRY.
Q6. Diala's stylistic features in The Lure of Ash
- Extended central symbol: ash as burning, loss, mourning, and also fertile residue/renewal, unifying the three phases.
- Elegiac register: lament for personal loss and national/historical trauma (echoes of Nigeria's civil-war memory).
- Dense allusion and intertextuality drawing on myth, history, and literary tradition.
- Symbolic density: fire and ash imagery as metaphor for both grief and societal decay.
- Structural patterning: the three-part titling (Hues, Swell, Trail of Ash) signals colour/intensity, growth/climax, and aftermath/legacy — trace this poem by poem in your text.
Q7. Diala's preoccupation across the three phases
- The Hues of Ash: the varied "colours" or shades grief and mourning can take.
- The Swell of Ash: the intensification of grief/history, building toward crisis, often against Nigeria's socio-political wounds.
- The Trail of Ash: the aftermath and legacy of destruction — what endures and whether renewal from ruin is possible.
Overall preoccupation: how personal and collective suffering leave lasting residue, and whether that residue is redemptive or simply a mark of irrecoverable loss.
Q8. Krog's preoccupation in Body Bereft
- The ageing, changing female body — menopause and physical transformation as sites of loss and unexpected liberation.
- Mortality and the passage of time, confronted through bodily experience rather than abstraction.
- Identity and selfhood in transition as the body and social role change.
- The South African landscape and history often intrude on the personal/bodily reflection.
Q9. Krog's style in Body Bereft
- Confessional, first-person intimacy — direct, unflinching address to the body.
- Visceral, physical imagery described frankly rather than euphemistically.
- Free verse with irregular line breaks mirroring the unpredictability of ageing.
- Fragmentation reflecting a self in flux.
- Blending of personal and political/historical, so bodily imagery opens onto South African social memory.