West Bengal Civil Service
Examination-2006
(Optional Papers)
English Paper -II
Time Allowed : 3 Hours Full Marks : 100
1. Answer any one of the following :
(a) How is 'Nature' depicted in Romantic Poetry ? Write with reference to one major poet of the period and his poems,
(b) Of the two odes — 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'—which one do you like more and why ? Write with reference to the text,
(c) Does Matthew Arnold convey any social and philosophic message through his poems. Write with illustrative references to his poems that you have read,
(d) Indicate some of the new directions maked out in the poems of W.B. Yeats with reference to 'The Wild Swans at Coole' (1917) or any other of his poems that you have read.
2. Answer any one of the following :
(a) 'Shaw clearly expresses his views as a non-romantic and a champion of the thinking man'—Justify this statement from your study of Arms and the Man.
(b) Do you think that Galsworthy was a dramatist on social and moral themes ? Write with reference to oneof his dramas that you have read,
(c) Write a critical note on Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and comment on the dramatist's contributions.
3. Answer any one of the following :
(a) Write an essay on 'Industrial Novel' in the Victorian period and its major exponents,
(b) Write on the contributions of women Novelists in the Victorian period with reference to any one of the following : George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Bronte sisters,
(c) Write critical note on any one of the following novels :
(i) David Copperfield, (ii) The Return of the Native, (tii) Vanity Fair.
4. The following poem is written by a soldier-poet on war/soldier. Bring out the central idea and add a critical note :
Futility
Move him into the Sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once.
At home, whispering of fields unsown,
Always ii woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse- him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds,—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear—archieved, are sides,
Full-nerved-still warm too hard to stir ?
Was it for this the clay crew tall ?
—O'what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all ?
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