Study for Everyone

আর্মস অ্যান্ড দ্যা ম্যান (Arms and the Man) নাটকটি সংঘটনের সময় ১৮৮৫ সালে বুলগেরিয়া ও সার্বিয়ার যুদ্ধের শেষ সময়ে। নাটকের প্রথম দৃশ্যে নায়িকা রাইনা পেটকফ (Raina Petkoff) বারান্দায় দাঁড়িয়ে চন্দ্রালোকিত রাত ও বরফ ঢাকা বলকান পর্বতমালার সৌন্দর্য উপভোগ করছিল। এ অসময় তাঁর মা ক্যাথেরিন পেটকফের (Catherine Petkoff) আগমনে তাঁর কাজের ব্যঘাত ঘটে। তাঁর মা তাকে একটি খুশির সংবাদ জানাতেই এসেছিল। তাঁর কাছ থেকেই আমরা জানতে পারি বুলগেরিয়ান সেনাবাহিনীর একটি ঘোড়সওয়ার দল সার্বিয়ান সেনাদের বিরুদ্ধে স্লিভনিজাতে (Slivnitza ) বিজয় লাভ করেছে। আর এই ঘোড়সওয়ার বাহিনীর নেতৃত্বে ছিল রাইনার বাগদত্ত মেজর সার্জিয়াস (Sergius)। এসময় লৌকা (পরিচারিকা) এসে খবর দেয় যে সার্বিয়ান সেনাবাহিনীর লোকেরা বুলগেরিয়ানদের ভয়ে পালিয়েছে এবং অনেকেই তাদের শহরেও ঢুকেছে। বুলগেরিয়ান সেনাবাহিনী তাদেরকে হত্যার উদ্দেশ্যে তাদের পিছু নিয়েছে। যে কোন সময় তাদের শহরে গোলাগুলি হতে পারে। সে জন্যে দরজা জানালা বন্ধ করে তাদের সাবধানে থাকা উচিত। রাইনা এতে শঙ্কিত ছিল না বরং সে তাঁর ঘরের জানালা খোলা রেখে দিল। রাতে একজন লোক এই খোলা জানালা দিয়ে প্রবেশ করল আর রাইনা...

Ans. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet "How Do I Love Thee?" is remarkable for its singere expression of love.There she frankly declares her love for her husband with considerable degree,of passionate intensity. In a desperate attempt to count her love, the poet uses a number of imáges. The images are very often conventional, yet they have been an effective tool to express the strong feelings of the poct for her husband. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is made so humble by love that she attempts to describe its nature. The poem begins with a seif- question- "How do I love thee?" It is clear that she is attempting to "count" or assess her love. The second person address is directed to towards her husband. Although she poses this dramatic question, she already knows the answer, as she confesses: I love thee to tlhe depth and breath and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. She loves him from the core of...

Ans. Literally meta' means beyond and physical means physical nature. Metaphysical poetry therefore means poetry that goes beyond the physical world of the senses and explores the spiritual world. Metaphysical poetry makes wide use of ingenons conceits, imaginative images and usually presents a combination of intense emotion with mental ingenuity. Conceit is an elaborate , extended and starting omparison between two dissimilar things . A conceit may be a brief metphor, but usually forms the framework of an entire poem. In Englsh there are two basic kinds of conceits--Petrarchan and Metaphysical. The poem begins with the deseription of a time when the speaker had not yet fallen in love. In order to clarify his point the spcaker uses the conceit of a baby. Like a baby the lovers were not "wean'd" till falling in love. The idea is that before falling in love, they had not come to their maturity, rather they "suck'd on country pleasures, childishly". This...

Ans : How Do I Love Thee?" is one of the famous sonnets of E.B. Browning, an English Victorian poet. She has given expression to her profound love for her husband, Robert Prowning, through the medium of her high poetic crafts. It is a Petrarchan or Italian type of sonnet, consisting of fourteen iambic pentameter lines, and divided into octave and sestet. The rhyme scheme of the octave is abba abba and that of the sestet is cdcded. E. Barrett has employed the poetic form as a medium of expression of her love for her husband. The theme is introduced in the octave and carried on through the sestet, the Petrarchan sonnet it is. The form is perfectly suitable for the topic it deals with. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet "How Do I Love Thee?" is remarkable for its singere expression of love.There she frankly declares her love for her husband with considerable degree,of passionate intensity. In a desperate attempt to count her love, the poet uses a number of imáges. Th...

Ans. In "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", Death is the core theme. From the poem we come to know that Thomas Gray's attitude toward death at first is that everyone faces the same end, regardless of their social standing or sense of importance. With many of the lines of this poem, the author notes the positions in life that the living once held, and the activities that filled their days. He compares the powerful and humble. The mighty reach an end that is exactly the same as the lowly: "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike the inevitable hour..." Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is a reflection about death as the final domain of the human condition, regardless of wealth, position, or power. The first four stanzas present the images of twilight settling over a solitary figure in a small country churchyard. The first line, "The curfew tolls the knell of par...

Ans. The 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' is all about the common people. It came from the master mind of Thomas Gray. He neutralised the fact of being rich or poor. The gravity of aristocracy or blue blood is not any achievement. It is just by luck. Aristocracy gives economic freedom and economy helps to overcome the struggles. That's why they can go beyond the distance. He says the rich should not treat the poor roughly. People have nothing to pride for. Death will make all level. In his poem Death the Leveller', James Shirley says, "Only the actions of the just. Smell sweet and blossom in their dust." There goes a proyerb, "Equal competition demands equal opportunities. The opportunity between the rich and the poor is not same. So, they can't be judged equally. They are the inhabitants of different pole. Gray believed if the poor people of Hamlet got equal opportunities, they could become leaders, scientist, or poets. Opportunities create s...

Ans. The pastoral elegy is a poem about both death and idyllic rural life. Often, the 'elegy takes the pastoral elements and relates them to express poet's grief. The pastoral elegy is incredibly moving and in its most classic form it concerns itself with simplc, country figures. 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' is an eiegy in name but not in form. The essential characteristics of the clegy, which are invoking the Muse, expressing the shepherd's (or poet's) grief, praising the dead, inveighing against-death, telling the affects of death on a personified nature, accepting death and acknowledging the hope of immortality, are missing or modified in Thomas Gray's elegy. The 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' is all about the common people. It came from the master mind of Thomas Gray. He neutralised the fact of being rich or poor. The gravity of aristocracy or blue blood is not any achievement. It is just by luck.Aristocracy gives economic fre...

Ans: Ted Hughes has deep inclingtion towards animal imagery. He has been obsęssed with animals: He uses animals as a means to express his own philosophy about human' being. Many of his poems are based on animals. In these poems he deals with violent instinct'in animals He actually deals with wild instinct in human beings. His main focus of attention is not on an anima! but on human beings. The violent and predatory shape in human nature has been described in his poem Pike' quite allegorically. The poem deals with root of primitiye energy in human being with its violent irrational and deadly nature. The writer endeavors to point out the act that pational consciousness in human being is subordinated and spoiled on special circumstances. Ted Hughes takes keen interest in human afairs ,has been represented in the poem 'Pike'. This poem represents the poet's preoccupation with animals. Man has primordial natural forces in him. This plundering tendency is exposed when...

Ans. Emily Dickinson is a famous American poet. One of the most prominent themes of her poems is death and immortality. "Because I Could not Stop for Death" is one of her many poems which deal specially with this theme. She might have been inspired with this theme by the high mortality rate for the young people of a New England town where she was brought up.This was, perhaps, also the cause of her withdrawal from the world, her doubts about the fulfilment of her worldly desires, and the possible life beyond the grave. She was more death-haunted than any other English and American poets. The thought of immortality is closely linked with the thought of death. In some of her poems Dickinson imagines her own death, while in some other poems she meditates on death as a general theme. She belicves that immortality of the soul can be achieved through dissolution, decay and death of the temporal body.To her death is the gateway to the divine and to the immortality of the soul. ...

Ans. Mysticism is the belief in the possibility of the union of man's soul with some higher spirit o. force, such as nature and a deity. The union is achieved through imagination or contemplation, and it involves the subordination of reason to intuition both as a means of contacting the higher force and as a source of knowledge. A mystic poet deals with the themes of God, soul, death, imnortality, and union of the human soul with the Divine. But mysticism has been practised in different forms in different religions, and many thinkers look upon mysticism in different ways: they regard mysticism as a temper and a mood, rather than any systematic philosophy. Emily Dickinson is a famous American poet. One of the most prominent themes of her poems is death and immortality. "Because I Could not Stop for Death" is one of her many poems which deal specially with this theme. She might have been inspired with this theme by the high mortality rate for the young people of a New Engla...

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings. In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide. So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past. 1. What picture of mother is depicted in the poem? 2. Describe the nostalgic melancholy of the speaker. 3. What image of a childhood do you get from the poem? 4 Summarise the poem. 5. What is the influence of music in the speaker's life? 6. What are the central ideas of the poem? 7. What is the structure of t...

Answer : Chance and coincidence play a vital role in the plot of the novel, Silas Marner. They direct the action of the novel and determine the course of action. They play an important role in the development of the life protagonists Silas Marner and Godfrey Cass. Chance and coincidence are determining factors in the life of Silas Marner. At the beginning of thé novel he is perfectly an innocent man. He ieads a pious life possessing an ardent religious faith. He is engaged to Sarah. But his friend William Dane has a liking for the girl and wants to marry her. Because of Dane's machination, Silas is charged with theft. He denics the crime. The members of Lantern Yard draw lots to be certain of Marner's guilt. It is sheer chance that the lots the lots declares him guilty. At this, Siias's faith in God and man is shaken and he that there was no just God and departed from Lantern Yard in despair for good. With this departure the real action of the novel starts. It is pure chanc...

Answer: Silas Marner and Godfrey Cass are the two protagonists of the novel, Silas Marner. They belong to the different strata of the society Silas belongs to the working class and Godfrey to the higher class. But certain tings are common to both of them - they are unable to face the reality of a mysterious universe and there is absence of love in them for the fellow human beings . At the beginning of the novel when we meet Godfrey for the first time we find potential evil in him. His character deteriorates for lack of parental care and attention. He courts Nancy Lammeter and wants to mary her, But he secretly marries Molly who is a drug- addict. Molly gives birth to a child. Godfrey tells her in a fit of passion that he would Godfrey by appearing al the Red House and revealing to Squire Cass that she is the wife of his oldest son. She cannot reach the Red House because she dies in the snow. He commits ancther sin by not acknowledging his child when Marner appears before him wit...

Ans. "The Luncheon" is an interesting and humorous short story by William Somerset Maugham. The writer develops the story by using irony and humour. Irony is a figur of speech in which the writer or the speaker says one thing when he means something different or opposite of his meaning. Humour and ony in this story are found in the fact that the narrator is trying io appear sophisticated, urban and gallant, where as he really cannot afford to entertain the lady guest in such an expensive restaurant as Foyot's. The author feels relived initially because the lady tells him hat she never eats anything for luncheon, but then he is appalled when the lady orders some of the most expensive items of the restaurant. In fact she exploits the author mercilessly by pretending an interest in his writing which she probably does not really feel. At the same time, the author describes the situation in just a few words. "Foyot's is a restaurant at which the French senators eat a...

Answer: The author William Somerset Maugham of The Luncheon, relates a lady who is an admirer of his stories. She wins the author's favour and expresses her wish to meet him aí a high class restaurant. The writer exposes the false motives of modest eating habits of the middle classes with a touch of humour. It was twenty years ago, when the writer was young and inexperienced. He was exploited by one of his lady admirers who wrote a letter to the writer appreciating one of his books. An enother letter she requested to give a luncheon at Foyot's. The lady was a shameless flatterer. She had a design in her mind when she wrote a letter to the writer praising one of his books. The design was to exploit the writer. She was so cunning that the writer being young and inexperienced became easily prey to her. In her second letter she expressed her desire to meet him and she also requested him to give her a luncheon at Foyot's. On the appointed day they met at Foyot's. The poor wr...

Answer: Rabindranath Tagore had written a letter to Lord Chelmsford in 1219. He primarily wrote it with a view to rejecting his Knighthood conferred upon bim by the British Governinent. But his "Letter to Lord Chelmsford Rejecting Knighthood" becomes a strong protest against the British ule in India. At first sight, it does not scem to be a protest against the British Government. Rather it appears as a modest and polite protest against the brutality of the British Indian Governent. But when we read it with much mconcentration, we find that the ietter mirrors the rebellious character of Rabindranath. It expresses in an artistic way what he actually felt against the British colouial rule in India. As a landloid, he could not have actually anmple scope to rciel openly and directly like Kazi Nazrul islam. The massacre in Jalianwallahbag of Amritsar led Rabindranath to protest against the British rule in India. He is really a true son of India. He is a patriot and a nationalist. ...