ae Classes XI\ & Xi) Examination Year 2025 onwardsNo. Page No. 1. Abhisara - the Tryst : | ~ Rabindranath Tagore 2. Why I Like the Hospital 9 | — Tony Hoagland 3. Sonnet 116 8 | — William Shakespeare | 4. Death of a Naturalist - = Seamus Heaney 5, Strange Meeting 20 — Wilfred Owen 6. Eve to Her Daughters 24 — Judith Wright 7. The King Speaks to the Scribe 29 — Keki N. Daruwalla 8. Funeral Blues a4 — W.H, Auden 9. Two Tramps in Mud Time 37 — Robert Frost 10. Refugee Mother and Child 42 = Chinua Achebe 11. Telephone Conversation 45 — Wole Soyinka 12. Tithonus a — Alfred, Lord Tennyson )14, 15. 16. i, 18. 19. 20. Beethoven — Shane Koyczan Small Towns and the River = Mamang Dai Death Be Not Proud = John Donne Crusoe in England — Elizabeth Bishop ‘A Walk by Moonlight — Henry Louis Vivian Derozio Enterprise — Nissim Ezekiel Frost at Midnight — Samuel Taylor Coleridge Ode to the West Wind — Percy Bysshe Shelley (o) 60 64 74 80 89About the Poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) Rabindranath 1 agore was a renowned Indian (Bengali) poet, short-stor y Writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from tr. Sanskrit. ‘aditional models based on classical He was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India. In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature for his collection of poems titled Gitanjali. Although Tagore wrote successfu lly inall literary genres, he was first of all a poet. Among his fifty and odd volumes of poetry are Manasi or The Ideal One (1890), Sonar Tari or The Golden Boat (1894), Katha O Kahini (1899), Gitanjali or Song Offerings (1910), Gitimalya or Wreath of Songs (1914), and Balaka or The Flight of Cranes (1916). The English renderings of his poetry include The Gardener (1913), Fruit-Gathering (1916), and The Fugitive (1921). In these volumes of verse, he experimented with many poetic forms and techniques — lyric, sonnet, ode, dramatic monologue, dialogue poems, long narrative and descriptive works, and prose poems. Abhisara, translated as ‘The Tryst’, was written in Bengali by Rabindranath in 1899 and appeared in a collection called Katha O Kahini, which was inspired by Rajendralal Mitra’s masterpiece “Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal’. The poems in this collection are from tales of Buddhist, Sikh, Rajasthan, Marathi or other non-Bengali literary traditions. 5Tagore translated this poem into English for a collection of eighty-six translated poems called Fruit-Gathering, brought out in 1916 by Macmillan. This is a story-poem based on Upagupta, a Buddhist monk who lived in the 300 BCE and was revered by Emperor Ashoka. It demonstrates the values of love and compassion that may be found in unexpected persons under unusual circumstances.1 Abhisara - the Tryst — Rabindranath Tagore Upagupta, the disciple of Buddha, lay asleep in the dust by the city wall of Mathura. Lamps were all out, doors were all shut, and stars were all hidden by the murky sky of August. Whose feet were those tinkling with anklets, touching his breast of a sudden? He woke up startled, and the light from a woman's lamp fell on his forgiving eyes. It was Vasavadatta the dancing girl, starred with jewels, Clouded with a pale blue mantle, drunk with the wine of her youth. She lowered her lamp and saw the young face, austerely beautiful. ‘Forgive me, young ascetic,’ said the woman, ‘Graciously come to my house. The dusty earth is nota fit bed for you.’ The young ascetic answered, Woman, go on your way; When the time is ripe I will come to you.’ Suddenly the black night showed its teeth in a flash of lightning. The storm growled from the corner of the sky, and the woman trembled in fear. A year had not yet passed. It was evening of a day in April, in the Spring. The branches of the wayside trees were full of blossom.Gay notes of a flute came floating in the warm spring air from afar. The citizens had gone to the woods for the festival of flowers. From the mid-sky gazed the full moon on the shadows of the silent town. The young ascetic was walking in the lonely street, While overhead the love-sick koels uttered from the mango branches their sleepless plaint. Upagupta passed through the city gates, and stood at the base of the rampart. What woman lay at his feet in the shadow of the mango grove? Struck with the black pestilence, her body spotted with sores of small-pox, She had been hurriedly driven away from the town To avoid her poisonous contagion. The ascetic sat by her side, took her head on his knees, And moistened her lips with water, and smeared her body with balm. ‘Who are you, merciful one?’ asked the woman. ‘The time, at last, has come to visit you, and lam here, Vasavdatta,’ replied the young ascetic.About the Poet Tony Hoagland (1953-2018) Anthony Dey Ho, American poet. H agland was a renowned modern is father was an Army doctor, so Hoagland grew up on various military bases in Hawaii, Alabama, Ethiopia, and Texas. According to the novelist Don Lee, Hoagland “attended and dropped out of several colleges, picked apples and cherries in the Northwest, lived in communes, followed the Grateful Dead and became a Buddhist.” He taught in the University of Houston creative writing program. He was also on the faculty of the low- residency Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He received the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, the Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He died in 2018. Hoagland authored several poetry collections: Sweet Ruin (1992), which was chosen for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and won the Zacharis Award from Emerson College; Donkey Gospel (1998), winner of the James Laughlin Award; What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Rain (2005); and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2018). He has also published two collections of essays about poetry. In his final book of poems, Turn Up the Ocean, published in 2022, he has been characterized as “one of the most distinctive voices of our time”. Hoagland’s poetry is known for its acerbic, witty take on contemporary life and “straight talk.” In 2010, Dwight Garner, a New York Times critic, wrote of Hoagland: “Hiserudite comic poems are backloaded with heartache ang longing, and they function, emotionally, like improviseq explosive devices: The pain comes at you from the cruelest angles, on the sunniest of days.” The poems in Turn Up the Ocean examine with an unflinching eye and mordant humour the reality of living and dying in a time and culture that conspire to erase our inner lives. In these poems, perseverance depends on a gymnastics of skepticism and comedy, a dogged quest for authentic connection, and the consolations of the natural world.Why I Like the Hospital — Tony Hoagland Because it is all right to be in a bad mood there, slouching along through the underground garage, riding wordlessly on the elevator with the other customers, staring at the closed beige doors like a prison wall. 1 like the hospital for the way it grants permission for pathos —the mother with cancer deciding how to tell her kids, the bald girl gazing downward at the shunt installed above her missing breast, the crone in her pajamas, walking with an IV pole. I don’t like the smell of antiseptic, or the air-conditioning set on high all night, or the fresh flowers tossed into the wastebasket, but I like the way some people on their plastic chairs break out a notebook and invent a complex scoring system to tally up their days on earth, the column on the left that says, Times I Acted Like a Fool, facing the column on the right that says, Times I Acted Like a Saint. Ilike the long prairie of the waiting; the forced intimacy of the self with the self; each sick person standing in the middle of a field, like a tree wondering what happened to the forest.And once I saw a man ina lime-green dressing gown, hunched over ina chair; a man who was not yelling at the doctors, or pretending to be strong, or making a murmured phone call to his wife, but one sobbing without shame, pumping it all out from the bottom of the self, the overflowing bilge of helplessness and rage, aman no longer expecting to be saved, but if you looked, you could see that he was holding his own hand in sympathy, listening to every single word, and he was telling himself everything.-.———— About the Poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616) William Shakespeare was a renowned English poet, playwright, and actor during the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages of British the. Renaissance or the ‘atre (sometimes called the English Early Modern Period). Shakespeare's plays are perhaps his most enduring legacy, but they are not all he wrote. Shakespeare’s poems also remain popular to this day, His father was John Shakespeare who married Mary Arden, and together they had eight children, of whom William was the eldest son. John Shakespeare worked as a glove-maker, but he also became an important figure in the town of Stratford by fulfilling civic positions. When William was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway and together they had three children. Shakespeare's career started in London, and by 1592 his reputation was established there. His first works that were published were two long poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). He also became a founding member of The Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company of actors. Shakespeare was the company’s regular dramatist, producing on average two plays a year, for almost twenty years. He remained with the company for the rest of his career, during which time it evolved into The King’s Men under the patronage of King James I (from 1603). Altogether Shakespeare’s works include 38 plays, 2 narrative poems, 154 sonnets, and a variety of other poems. No original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays are known to exist today. It is actually thanks to a group of actors from 13Shakespeare’s company that we have about half of the plays at all. Shakespeare's legacy is as rich and diverse as his work; his writings have been compiled in various iterations of Thy Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which include all of his plays, sonnets, and other poems. William Shakespeare continues to be one of the most important literary figures of the English language. Sonnet 116 was first published in 1609. Its structure and form are a typical example of the Shakespearean sonnet. The poet begins by stating that he does not object to the “marriage of true minds” but maintains that love is not true if it changes with time; true love is constant, regardless of difficulties, Ideal love is maintained as unchanging throughout the sonnet, and Shakespeare concludes in the final couplet that he is either correct in his estimation of love, or else that no man has ever truly loved. 143 Sonnet 116 = William Shakespeare Let me not to the Marriage of true minds Admit impediments, love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand ring bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come, Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom: If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 15About the Poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He became a lecturer at St. Joseph’s College in Belfast in the early 1960s, after attending Queen's University and began to publish poetry. He lived in Sandymount, Dublin, from 1976 until his death and lived part-time in the United States from 1981 to 2006. He was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997, and its Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994, he was also Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In 1996 he was made a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was also the recipient of many awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), the T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). In 2011, he was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and in 2012, a Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust. Heaney received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as “the most important Irish poet since Yeats”, and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was “the greatest poet of our age”. Robert Pinsky has stated that “with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller.” Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as “probably the best-known poet in the world”.Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. It consists of 34 short poems and is largely concerned with childhood experiences and the formulation of adult identities, family relationships, and rural life. ‘cond Death of a Naturalist, the collection’s s poem, details the exploitsofa young boy collecting frogspawn from a flax-dam. The narrator remembers everything he saw and felt at those times. He then remembers his teacher telling him all about frogs ina section that speaks volumes about childhood innocence. Finally, we hear about a trip to the flax-dam that went wrong. He feels threatened by the srown-up frogs. His interest in nature has gone - this is the death of a “naturalist” suggested in the poem’s title.[4] Death of a Naturalist = Seamus Heaney All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland; green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies, But best of all was the warm thick slobber Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied Specks to range on window sills at home, On shelves at school, and wait and watch until The fattening dots burst, into nimble Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how The daddy frog was called a bullfrog And how he croaked and how the mammy frog Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too For they were yellow in the sun and brown In rain. Then one hot day when fields were rank With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs “<Invaded the flax-dam; | ducked through hedges To a coarse croaking that | had not heard Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, MC, was an English poet aised as an Anglican of the evange| and soldier. He was ical type, and in his youth was a devout believer, in part thanks to his strong relationship with his mother, which lasted throughout his life. Owen is regarded by many as the greatest poet of the First World War, known for his verse about the horrors of trench and gas warfare. He had been writing poetry for some years before the war, himself dating his poetic beginnings to a stay at Broxton by the Hill, Cheshire, during a holiday in 1904, when he was ten years old. The poetry of William Butler Yeats was a significant influence on Owen’s early writing and poetry as were the Romantic poets Keats and Shelley. His great friend, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, later had a profound effect on his poetic voice, and Owen's most famous poems Dulce et Decorum est and Anthem for Doomed Youth show direct results of Sassoon’s influence. Manuscript copies of the poems survive, annotated in Sassoon’s handwriting. Owen's poetry would eventually be more widely acclaimed than that of his mentor. His war poetry stood in contrast to the public perception of war at the time and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Among his best-known works - most of which were published posthumously - are Dulce et Decorum est, Insensibility, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility, Spring Offensive and Strange Meeting. 20