Literature in English JAMB, WAEC, NECO AND NABTEB Official Past Questions

Science, that simple saint, cannot be bothered Figuring what anything is far;

Enough for her devotions that things are And can be contemplated soon as gathered

She knows how every living thing was fathered,
She calculates the climate of each star,
She counts the fish at sea, but cannot care
Why any one of them exists, fish, fire or feathered

The dominant rhetorical device used in the poem is

‘And now the bells are chiming
A year is born
‘And my heart bell is ringing
in a dawn’
The writer of these words is in a state of

He would like some good Fufu, but without a lot of meat, street Fufu is miserable food, and with meat the cost will crucify a man completely.
The man in this passage is obviously

‘But it has been from the first her great mistake to meet him, marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle: all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men’.
The sentiment expressed here about the curse on women is

‘Cheers!’ said koomson. he looked ready to add something as he raised his glass, but the high voice of his wife cut the air to pieces.
‘This local beer,’she was saying, ‘does agree with my constitution.’
‘And what sort of constitution is it that you have?’asked the man from his isolated place.

What the writer feels for or toward the woman in his passage is

‘Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest and i know not-
So much the happier am i’
This verse is taken from a poem written by a soldier at the battle-front. He clearly sees dying in battle as

‘He glanced at his bitten nails, and with his chin resting on his knees, said, ‘well, i ask them to let me go below to visit my pa in the cell. they feel sorry for me, and say its okay. So i go down to see him, this man what made my ma’s life a misery like hell, and who never had a word for me, and did nothing but give me the belt’.
From what he says, the kid in this passage

‘But now as he climbed the steep path leading to his home, his courage started to lag behind. His conscience lagged behind. His weak body and hungry stomach pushed him expectantly up the path towards home, where rest and satisfaction awaited him…’
The literary device predominantly used in this passage is

So fair fancy few would weave
In these years!
The poetic device consciously used here is

‘Dead leaves blew into the room.
And alighted upon my bed.
Ans a tree declared to the gloom
Its sorrow that they were shed’
The mood registered in these lines is

‘Folk all fade. And whither.
As i wait alone where the fair was?
Into the clammy and numbing night fog
Whence they entered hither
Soon one more goes thither!
In these lines, ‘the clammy and numbing night fog’ (line3) refers to

‘He sat down on a box. he took out letter he had received from Joseph the other Friday and read it again. Then he put it back. A tear, a single tear, ran down his face. he rubbed it off, rather impatiently. he poured water, cold water from a cup, into one hand and washed his face.
He was suddenly very lucid, calm inside’.
What makes this scene taken from a novel very real to the reader is the writer’s use of

In Mine Boy Peter Abraham’s is of the view that in South Africa

Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is a romantic poem because

In Oswald Mtshali’s ‘nightfall in Soweto’, Night represents

In The Marriage of Anansewa, to which character
do the following praise-names refer?
‘Oh Mighty-Tree-of-Ancient-Origin
Mighty-Tree-of-Ancient-Origin
Rooted in the shrine of deity
Countless branches in which
Benighted wandering birds
Are welcome to shelter’

The subject of ‘If You Should Know Me’ by Oswald Mtshali is that the

Which character does NOT fit into the group?

Which character made the following statement in Macbeth?:
This castle hath a pleasant seat, the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses’

what is the subject of Kalu Uka’s ‘Earth to Earth?

Dramatic irony entails