Test Papers / Previous Question Papers of IGNOU DCE5 Writing Poetry December 2005

DIPLOMA IN CREATIVE WRITING IN ENGLISH
Term-End Examination

December, 2005

DCE-5 : WRITING POETRY

Time: 3 hours
Maximum Marks: 100
(Weightage 70%)

SECTION A

1. What are public themes in poetry ? How have poets dealt with them ? Choose any public theme and show how you would deal with it in a poem. (400 words) (20)

2. What are innovations in poetry ? Why do they occur ? Mention some innovations used by Indian poets writing in English. (400 words) (20)

3.What is a cliche ? What is its relationship to the language of poetry ? What use are cliches in poetry ? (400 words) (20)

4. Write an essay on the endings of poems. (400 words) (20)

5. Write short notes on any two : (200 words each) (10+10)

(i) The colloquial idiom in poetry

(ii) Remembering the past in poetry

(iii) Kinds of poetic structure

(iv) English metre (Give the kinds, with examples of each kind)

(v) The symbolic mode

SECTION B

Read the following poems and answer the questions given below each.

6. MAKARAND
- Arun Kolatkar (1932 - 2005)

Take my shirt off
and go in there to do puja ?
No thank.

Not me.
But you go right ahead
if that's what you want to do.

Give me the matchbox
before you go,
will you ?

I will be out in the courtyard
where no one will mind it
if I smoke.

(i) Who are the speaker and addressee ?

(ii) What is the situation here ? What is the larger issue the poet has raised ?

(iii) What relationship between speaker and addressee is suggested by "Give me the matchbox / before you go, will you ?"

(iv) Is the speaker irreverent ? Whom does he include in "no one"?

7 . HOME COMING-2
- R. Parthosarathy (1934 - )

To live in Tamil Nadu is to be conscious
every day of impotence.
There is the language, for instance :

the bull, Nammalvar¹ took by the horns,
is today an unrecognizable carcass,
quick with the fleas of Kodambakkam.

There is little you can do about it,
except throw up your hands.
How long can foreign poets

provide the staple of your lines ?
Then inward. Scrape the bottom of your past.
Ransack the cupboard

for skeletons of your Brahmin childhood
(the nights with Father droning
the Four Thousand² as sleep

pinched your thighs blue) you may then,
perhaps, strike out a line for yourself
from the iron of life's ordinariness

1. Tamil Bhakti poet who flourished about A.D. 900

2. Collection of Tamil hymns written between the fifth and ninth centuries A.D.

(i) What is this poem about ?

(ii) Whom does he refer to as "foreign poets" and what does he believe to be the state of Tamil language ?

(iii) Whom has the poet addressed in stanzas 4, 5, and 6 ?

(iv) Identify and comment on the metaphors in this extract. (4x5)

THE BUSY HEART (1913)
- Rupert Brooke (1887 - 1915)

Now that we've done our best and worst, and parted,
    I would fill my mind with thoughts that will not rend
(O heart, I do not dare go empty-hearted)
    I'll think of Love in books, Love without end;
Women with child, content; and old men sleeping;
    And wet strong ploughlands, scarred for certain grain;
And babes that weep, and so forget their weeping;
    And young heavens, forgetful after rain;
And evening hush, broken by homing wings;
    And Song's nobility, and Wisdom holy,
That live, we dead. I would think of a thousand things,
    Lovely and durable, and taste them slowly,
One after one, like tasting a sweet food.
I have need to busy my heart with quietude.

(i) What is the rhyme scheme ? Where does the turn in the thought occur ?

(ii) What is the poem about ? Whom is it addressed to ?

(iii) How does the poet develop line 2 ?

(iv) Comment on the paradox in the last line. What has emptied his heart ? Is it really empty ? In what sense ? Or does he hope to replace its present filling "with thoughts that will not rend ?"

(v) Are his "thoughts that will not rend" free of sorrow ? How do you react to them ? (5x4)

9. O DO NOT HAVE TOO LONG
- W.B. Yeats (1865 - 1939)

Sweetheart, do not love too long;
I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.

All through the years of our youth
Neither could have known
Their own thoughts from the other's,
We were so much at one.

But O, in a minute she changed -
O do not love too long,
Or you will grow out of fashion
Like an old song.

(i) Who is the speaker ? To whom are the lines addressed?

(ii) What is the advice offered by the speaker ?

(iii) What is the dominant emotion expressed in the poem ?

(iv) What does the speaker think of man-woman relationship ? What is comparison that he makes ? (4x5)

10. Write a lyric in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each, rhyming abba, with 4 or 5 stresses to a line. Your lyric should be on any one of the following topics : (20)

(i) Poetry

(ii) Rivers

(iii) Laughter of old women

(iv) May you never ...

(v) "He leaned on a staggering lawyer..."