Songs of Ourselves Volume 1 (Cambridge (CIE) IGCSE English Literature): Exam Questions

In what ways does Bhatt vividly convey her feelings about language and cultural identity in ‘A Different History’?

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

A Different History 

Great Pan is not dead; 
he simply emigrated
to India. 
Here, the gods roam freely, 
disguised as snakes or monkeys;
every tree is sacred 
and it is a sin 
to be rude to a book. 
It is a sin to shove a book aside
with your foot,
a sin to slam books down
hard on a table,
a sin to toss one carelessly
across a room.
You must learn how to turn the pages gently
without disturbing Sarasvati, 
without offending the tree 
from whose wood the paper was made. 

Which language
has not been the oppressor’s tongue?
Which language
truly meant to murder someone?
And how does it happen
that after the torture,
after the soul has been cropped
with a long scythe swooping out
of the conqueror’s face -
the unborn grandchildren
grow to love that strange language. 

 (Sujata Bhatt)

Explore how Blake conveys the child’s suffering and society’s cruelty in ‘The Chimney-Sweeper’.

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

The Chimney-Sweeper 

A little black thing among the snow,
Crying ‘weep, 'weep in notes of woe!
Where are thy father and mother, say?
‘They are both gone up to the church to pray.

‘Because I was happy upon the heath
And smiled among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

‘And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.’

(William Blake)

Explore how Brewster conveys the relationship between people and their environments in ‘Where I Come From’.

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

Where I Come From

People are made of places. They carry with them
Hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace
or the cool eyes of sea-gazers. Atmosphere of cities
how different drops from them, like the smell of smog
or the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring,
nature tidily plotted in little squares
with a fountain in the centre; museum smell,
art also tidily plotted with a guidebook;
or the smell of work, glue factories maybe,
Chromium-plated offices; smell of subways
crowded at rush hours.

Where I come from, people
carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods;
blueberry patches in the burned-out bush;
Wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint,
with yards where hens and chickens circle about,
clucking aimlessly; battered schoolhouses
behind which violets grow. Spring and winter
are the mind’s chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice.

A door in the mind blows open, and there blows
a frosty wind from fields of snow.

(Elizabeth Brewster)

Explore the ways in which Cheng makes ‘Report to Wordsworth’ such a disturbing poem. 

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

Report to Wordsworth 

You should be here, Nature has need of you. 
She has been laid waste. Smothered by the smog, 
the flowers are mute, and the birds are few 
in a sky slowing like a dying clock. 
All hopes of Proteus rising from the sea 
have sunk; he is entombed in the waste 
we dump. Triton’s notes struggle to be free, 
his famous horns are choked, his eyes are dazed, 
and Neptune lies helpless as a beached whale, 
while insatiate man moves in for the kill. 
Poetry and piety have begun to fail, 
as Nature’s mighty heart is lying still. 
O see the wound widening in the sky, 
God is labouring to utter his last cry.  

(Boey Kim Cheng)

How does Clarke powerfully convey the devastation of war in ‘Lament’.

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

Lament

For the green turtle with her pulsing burden,
in search of the breeding ground.
For her eggs laid in their nest of sickness.

For the cormorant in his funeral silk,
the veil of iridescence on the sand,
the shadow on the sea.

For the ocean’s lap with its mortal stain.
For Ahmed at the closed border.
For the soldier in his uniform of fire.

For the gunsmith and the armourer,
the boy fusilier who joined for the company,
the farmer’s sons, in it for the music.

For the hook-beaked turtles,
the dugong and the dolphin,
the whale struck dumb by the missile’s thunder.

For the tern, the gull and the restless wader,
the long migrations and the slow dying,
the veiled sun and the stink of anger.

For the burnt earth and the sun put out,
the scalded ocean and the blazing well.
For vengeance, and the ashes of language.

(Gillian Clarke)

In what ways does Halligan convey the speaker’s curiosity and self-reflection in ‘The Cockroach’?

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

The Cockroach

I watched a giant cockroach start to pace,
Skirting a ball of dust that rode the floor.
At first he seemed quite satisfied to trace
A path between the wainscot and the door,
But soon he turned to jog in crooked rings,
Circling the rusty table leg and back,
And flipping right over to scratch his wings –
As if the victim of a mild attack
Of restlessness that worsened over time.
After a while, he climbed an open shelf
And stopped. He looked uncertain where to go.
Was this due payment for some vicious crime
A former life had led to? I don’t know,
Except I thought I recognised myself.

(Kevin Halligan)

How does Heaney convey the relationship between father and son in ‘Follower’?

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

Follower

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

(Seamus Heaney)

In what ways does Lochhead strikingly portray the power of stories and imagination in ‘Storyteller’?

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

Storyteller

she sat down 
at the scoured table 
in the swept kitchen 
beside the dresser with its cracked delft.
And every last crumb of daylight was salted away.

No one could say the stories were useless 
for as the tongue clacked 
five or forty fingers stitched 
corn was grated from the husk 
patchwork was pieced 
or the darning was done. 

Never the one to slander her shiftless. 
Daily sloven or spotless no matter whether 
Dishwater or tasty was her soup. 
To tell the stories was her work. 
It was like spinning, 
gathering thin air to the singlest strongest 
thread. Night in 
she’d have us waiting, held 
breath, for the ending we knew by heart. 

And at first light 
as the women stirred themselves to build the fire 
as the peasant’s feet felt for clogs 
as thin grey washed over flat fields 
the stories dissolved in the whorl of the ear 
but they 
hung themselves upside down 
in the sleeping heads of the children 
till they flew again 
in the storytellers night.  

(Liz Lockhead)

Explore how Mungoshi vividly conveys the beauty and energy of the natural world in ‘Before the Sun’.

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

Before the Sun

Intense blue morning
promising early heat
and later in the afternoon,
heavy rain.

The bright chips
fly from the sharp axe
for some distance through the air,
arc,
and eternities later,
settle down in showers
on the dewy grass.

It is a big log:
but when you are fourteen
big logs
are what you want.

The wood gives off
a sweet nose-cleansing odour
which (unlike sawdust)
doesn't make one sneeze.

It sends up a thin spiral
of smoke which later straightens
and flutes out
to the distant sky: a signal
of some sort,
or a sacrificial prayer.

The wood hisses,
The sparks fly.

And when the sun
finally shows up
in the East like some
latecomer to a feast
I have got two cobs of maize
ready for it.

I tell the sun to come share
with me the roasted maize
and the sun just winks
like a grown-up.

So I go ahead, taking big
alternate bites:
one for the sun,
one for me.
This one for the sun,
this one for me:
till the cobs
are just two little skeletons
in the sun.

(Charles Mungoshi)

How does Philips powerfully express her views on marriage and independence in ‘A Married State’?

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

A Married State

A married state affords but little ease;
The best of husbands are so hard to please:
This in wives’ careful faces you may spell,
Though they dissemble their misfortunes well.
A virgin state is crowned with much content,
It’s always happy as it’s innocent:
No blustering husbands to create your fears,
No pangs of childbirth to extort your tears,
No children’s cries for to offend your ears,
Few worldly crosses to distract your prayers.
Thus are you freed from all the cares that do
Attend on matrimony, and a husband too.
Therefore, Madam, be advised by me:
Turn, turn apostate to love’s levity.
Suppress wild nature if she dare rebel,
There’s no such thing as leading apes in hell.

(Katherine Philips)

In what ways does Pope clearly convey his ideas about human nature and reason in From ‘An Essay on Man’?

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

From ‘An Essay on Man’

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a god or beast,
In doubt his mind or body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall,
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

(Alexander Pope)

How does Rumens movingly portray childhood and sacrifice in this poem?

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

Carpet-weavers, Morocco

The children are at the loom of another world. 
Their braids are oiled and black, their dresses bright. 
Their assorted heights would make a melodious chime. 

They watch their flickering knots like television. 
As the garden of Islam grows, the bench will be raised. 
Then they will lace the dark‑rose veins of the tree‑tops. 

The carpet will travel in the merchant’s truck. 
It will be spread by the servants of the mosque. 
Deep and soft, it will give when heaped with prayer. 

The children are hard at work in the school of days. 
From their fingers the colours of all‑that‑will‑be fly 
and freeze into the frame of all‑that‑was.

(Carol Rumens)

How does the speaker strikingly compare his lover to summer in ‘Sonnet 18’? 

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

Sonnet 18 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? 
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: 
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, 
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: 
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines 
And often is his gold complexion dimmed; 
And every fair from fair sometime declines, 
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed. 
But thy eternal summer shall not fade, 
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; 
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, 
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: 
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, 
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 

(William Shakespeare)

In what ways does Wright vividly convey the speaker’s awe and fear in ‘Hunting Snake’?

Support your ideas with details from the text. 

Hunting Snake

Sun-warmed in this late season’s grace
under the autumn’s gentlest sky
we walked, and froze half-through a pace.
The great black snake went reeling by.

Head- down, tongue flickering on the trail
he quested through the parting grass;
sun glazed his curves of diamond scale,
and we lost breath to watch him pass.

What track he followed, what small food
fled living from his fierce intent,
we scarcely thought; still as we stood
our eyes went with him as he went.

Cold, dark and splendid he was gone
into the grass that hid his prey.
We took a deeper breath of day,
looked at each other, and went on.

(Judith Wright)