Grade 10.

Literature in English - 2010 September 2 to September 6, 2024

SECTION A: POETRY

Answer one question from this section.

SONGS OF OURSELVES VOLUME 1: from Part 4

Remember to support your ideas with details from the writing.

1. Read this poem, and then answer the question that follows it:

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.

Sujhata Bhatt.

Q. How does the poet movingly convey the speaker's thoughts and feelings in this poem?

1
#Rana R. Sherwani
 Grade 10. Literature in English - 2010 September 2 to September 6, 2024

SECTION B

From STORIES OF OURSELVES Volume 2

1. Read the following text and answer the question that follows:

Then I came. I do not think I was prettier: I do not think I was so pretty as she was. I was certainly not
as handsome. But I was vital, and I was new, and she was old- they all forsook her and followed me.
They worshipped me. It was to my door that the flowers came; it was I had twenty horses offered me
when I could only ride one; it was for me they waited at street corners: it was what I said and did that
they talked of. Partly I liked it. I had lived alone all my life; no one ever had told me I was beautiful and
a woman. I believed them. I did not know it was simply a fashion, which one man had set the rest
followed unreasoningly. I liked them to ask me to marry them, and to say, No. I despised them. The
mother heart had not swelled in me yet; I did not know all men were my children, as the large woman
knows when her heart is grown. I was too small to be tender. I liked my power. I was like a child with a
new whip, which it goes about cracking everywhere, not caring against what. I could not wind it up
and put it away. Men were curious creatures, who liked me, I could never tell why. Only one thing took
from my pleasure; I could not bear that they had deserted her for me. I liked her great dreamy blue
eyes, I liked her slow walk and drawl; when I saw her sitting among men, she seemed to me much too
good to be among them; I would have given all their compliments if she would once have smiled at
me as she smiled at them, with all her face breaking into radiance, with her dimples and flashing
teeth. But I knew it never could be; I felt sure she hated me: that she wished I was dead; that she
wished I had never come to the village. She did not know, when we went out riding, and a man who
had always ridden beside her came to ride beside me, that I sent him away; that once when a man
thought to win my favour by ridiculing her slow drawl before me I turned on him so fiercely that he
never dared come before me again. I knew she knew that at the hotel men had made a bet as to
which was the prettier, she or I, and had asked each man who came in, and that the one who had
staked on me won. I hated them for it, but I would not let her see that I care about what she felt
towards me.

She and I never spoke to each other.

If we met in the village street we bowed and passed on: when we shook hands We did so silently, and
did not look at each other. But I thought she felt my presence in a room just as I felt hers.

At last the time for my going came. I was to leave the next day. Some one I knew gave a party in my
honour, to which all the village was invited.

It was midwinter. There was nothing in the gardens but a few dahlias and chrysanthemums, and I
suppose that for two hundred miles round there was not a rose to be bought for love or money. Only
in the garden of a friend of mine, in a sunny corner between the oven and the brick wall, there was a
rose tree growing which had on it one bud. It was white, and it had been promised to the fair haired
girl to wear at the party.

The evening came; when I arrived and went to the waiting-room, to take off my mantle, I found the girl
there already. She was dressed in pure white, with her great white arms and shoulders showing, and
her bright hair glittering in the candle-light, and the white rose fastened at her breast. She looked like
a queen. I said “Good-evening" and turned away quickly to the glass to arrange my old black scarf
across my old black dress.

Then I felt a hand touch my hair.

"Stand still," she said.

2
#Rana R. Sherwani
 Grade 10. Literature in English - 2010 September 2 to September 6, 2024

I looked in the glass. She had taken the white rose from her breast, and was fastening it in my hair.

"How nice dark hair is; it sets off flowers so." She stepped back and looked at me. "It looks much
better there!"

I turned round.

"You are so beautiful to me," I said.

"Y-e-s," she said, with her slow Colonial drawl; "I'm so glad."

We stood looking at each other.

Then they came in and swept us away to dance. All the evening we did not come near to each other.
Only once, as she passed, she smiled at me.

Q. How does the author make this moment so memorable?

2. Read the following text and answer the question that follows:

I picked up the book to read again, and must have fallen asleep immediately, for when I came to it
was almost time to go water the lawn. When I got downstairs the boy was not there. I called, but no
answer. Ten I went out into the alley in back of the garages to see if he was playing there. There were
three older boys sitting talking on a pile of old packing cases. They looked uneasy when I came up. I
asked if they had seen a little Negro boy, but they said they hadn’t. then I went farther down the alley
behind the grocery store where the trucks drove up, and asked one of the follows working there if he
had seen my boy. He said he had been working on the platform all afternoon and that he was sure the
boy had not been there. As I started away, the four o’clock whistle blew and I had to go water the
lawn. I wondered where the boy could have gone. As I came back up the alley I was becoming
alarmed. Then it occurred to me that he might have gone out in front in spite of my warning not to. Of
course, that was where he would go, out in front to sit on the grass. I laughed at myself for becoming
alarmed and decided not to punish him, even though Berry had given instructions that he was not to
be seen out in the front without me. A boy that size will make you do that.

As I came around the building past the tall new evergreens, I could hear the boy crying in just that
note no other child has, and when I came completely around I found him standing looking up into a
window with tears on his face.

`What is it, my son?` I asked. `What happened?`

`My ball, my ball, Daddy. My ball,` he cried, looking up at the window.
`Yes, son. But what about the ball?`
`He threw it up in the window.`
`Who did? Who threw it, son? Stop crying and tell Daddy about it.`

He made an effort to stop, wiping the tears away with the back of his hand.

`A big white boy asked me to throw him my ball an’, an’ he took it and threw it up in that window and
ran,` he said, pointing.

I looked up just as Berry appeared at the window. The ball had gone into his private office.

`John, is that your boy?` he snapped.

He was red in the face.
`Yessir, but-`
`Well, he’s taken his damned ball and ruined one of my plants.`
`Yessir.`

3
#Rana R. Sherwani
 Grade 10. Literature in English - 2010 September 2 to September 6, 2024

`You know he’s got no business around here in front, don’t you?`
`Yes.`
`Well, if I ever see him around here again, you’re going to find yourself behind the black ball. Now get
him on round to the back and then come up here and clean up this mess he’s made.`

I gave him one long hard look and then felt for the boy’s hand to take him back to quarters. I had a
hard time seeing as we walked back, and scratched myself by stumbling into the evergreens as we
went around the building.

The boy was not crying now, and when I looked down at him, the pain in my hand caused me to
notice that it was bleeding. When we got upstairs, I sat the boy in a chair and went looking for iodine
to doctor my hand.

`If anyone should ask me, young man, I’d say your face needed a good washing.`

He didn’t answer then, but when I came out of the bathroom, he seemed more inclined to talk.

`Daddy, what did that man mean?`

`Mean how, son?`
`About a black ball. You know, Daddy.`
`Oh-that.`
`You know, Daddy. What’d he mean?`
`He meant, son, that if your ball landed in his office again, Daddy would go after it behind the old black
ball.`

`Oh,` he said, very thoughtful again. Then, after a while he told me: `Daddy, that white man can’t see
very good, can he, Daddy?`
`Why do you say that, son?`
`Daddy,` he said impatiently. `Anybody can see my ball is white.`

For the second time that day I looked at him a long time.

`Yes, son,` I said. `Your ball is white.` Mostly white, anyway, I thought.
`Will I play with the black ball, Daddy?`
`In time son,` I said. `In time.`

He had already played with the ball; that he would discover later. He was learning the rules of the
game already, but he didn’t know it. Yes, he would play with the ball. Indeed, poor little rascal, he
would play until he grew sick of playing. My, yes, the old ball game. But I’d begin telling him the rules
later.

My hand was still burning from the scratch as I dragged the hose out to water the lawn, and looking
down at the iodine stain, I thought of the fellow’s fried hands, and felt in my pocket to make sure I still
had the card he had given me. Maybe there was a colour other than white on the old ball.

Q. How does Ellison make this moment so moving and dramatic?

4
#Rana R. Sherwani