ae Classes XI\ & Xi) Examination Year 2025 onwardsNo. Page No. 1. Abhisara - the Tryst : | ~ Rabindranath Tagore 2. Why I Like the Hospital 9 | — Tony Hoagland 3. Sonnet 116 8 | — William Shakespeare | 4. Death of a Naturalist - = Seamus Heaney 5, Strange Meeting 20 — Wilfred Owen 6. Eve to Her Daughters 24 — Judith Wright 7. The King Speaks to the Scribe 29 — Keki N. Daruwalla 8. Funeral Blues a4 — W.H, Auden 9. Two Tramps in Mud Time 37 — Robert Frost 10. Refugee Mother and Child 42 = Chinua Achebe 11. Telephone Conversation 45 — Wole Soyinka 12. Tithonus a — Alfred, Lord Tennyson )14, 15. 16. i, 18. 19. 20. Beethoven — Shane Koyczan Small Towns and the River = Mamang Dai Death Be Not Proud = John Donne Crusoe in England — Elizabeth Bishop ‘A Walk by Moonlight — Henry Louis Vivian Derozio Enterprise — Nissim Ezekiel Frost at Midnight — Samuel Taylor Coleridge Ode to the West Wind — Percy Bysshe Shelley (o) 60 64 74 80 89About the Poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) Rabindranath 1 agore was a renowned Indian (Bengali) poet, short-stor y Writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from tr. Sanskrit. ‘aditional models based on classical He was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India. In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature for his collection of poems titled Gitanjali. Although Tagore wrote successfu lly inall literary genres, he was first of all a poet. Among his fifty and odd volumes of poetry are Manasi or The Ideal One (1890), Sonar Tari or The Golden Boat (1894), Katha O Kahini (1899), Gitanjali or Song Offerings (1910), Gitimalya or Wreath of Songs (1914), and Balaka or The Flight of Cranes (1916). The English renderings of his poetry include The Gardener (1913), Fruit-Gathering (1916), and The Fugitive (1921). In these volumes of verse, he experimented with many poetic forms and techniques — lyric, sonnet, ode, dramatic monologue, dialogue poems, long narrative and descriptive works, and prose poems. Abhisara, translated as ‘The Tryst’, was written in Bengali by Rabindranath in 1899 and appeared in a collection called Katha O Kahini, which was inspired by Rajendralal Mitra’s masterpiece “Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal’. The poems in this collection are from tales of Buddhist, Sikh, Rajasthan, Marathi or other non-Bengali literary traditions. 5Tagore translated this poem into English for a collection of eighty-six translated poems called Fruit-Gathering, brought out in 1916 by Macmillan. This is a story-poem based on Upagupta, a Buddhist monk who lived in the 300 BCE and was revered by Emperor Ashoka. It demonstrates the values of love and compassion that may be found in unexpected persons under unusual circumstances.1 Abhisara - the Tryst — Rabindranath Tagore Upagupta, the disciple of Buddha, lay asleep in the dust by the city wall of Mathura. Lamps were all out, doors were all shut, and stars were all hidden by the murky sky of August. Whose feet were those tinkling with anklets, touching his breast of a sudden? He woke up startled, and the light from a woman's lamp fell on his forgiving eyes. It was Vasavadatta the dancing girl, starred with jewels, Clouded with a pale blue mantle, drunk with the wine of her youth. She lowered her lamp and saw the young face, austerely beautiful. ‘Forgive me, young ascetic,’ said the woman, ‘Graciously come to my house. The dusty earth is nota fit bed for you.’ The young ascetic answered, Woman, go on your way; When the time is ripe I will come to you.’ Suddenly the black night showed its teeth in a flash of lightning. The storm growled from the corner of the sky, and the woman trembled in fear. A year had not yet passed. It was evening of a day in April, in the Spring. The branches of the wayside trees were full of blossom.Gay notes of a flute came floating in the warm spring air from afar. The citizens had gone to the woods for the festival of flowers. From the mid-sky gazed the full moon on the shadows of the silent town. The young ascetic was walking in the lonely street, While overhead the love-sick koels uttered from the mango branches their sleepless plaint. Upagupta passed through the city gates, and stood at the base of the rampart. What woman lay at his feet in the shadow of the mango grove? Struck with the black pestilence, her body spotted with sores of small-pox, She had been hurriedly driven away from the town To avoid her poisonous contagion. The ascetic sat by her side, took her head on his knees, And moistened her lips with water, and smeared her body with balm. ‘Who are you, merciful one?’ asked the woman. ‘The time, at last, has come to visit you, and lam here, Vasavdatta,’ replied the young ascetic.About the Poet Tony Hoagland (1953-2018) Anthony Dey Ho, American poet. H agland was a renowned modern is father was an Army doctor, so Hoagland grew up on various military bases in Hawaii, Alabama, Ethiopia, and Texas. According to the novelist Don Lee, Hoagland “attended and dropped out of several colleges, picked apples and cherries in the Northwest, lived in communes, followed the Grateful Dead and became a Buddhist.” He taught in the University of Houston creative writing program. He was also on the faculty of the low- residency Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He received the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, the Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He died in 2018. Hoagland authored several poetry collections: Sweet Ruin (1992), which was chosen for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and won the Zacharis Award from Emerson College; Donkey Gospel (1998), winner of the James Laughlin Award; What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Rain (2005); and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2018). He has also published two collections of essays about poetry. In his final book of poems, Turn Up the Ocean, published in 2022, he has been characterized as “one of the most distinctive voices of our time”. Hoagland’s poetry is known for its acerbic, witty take on contemporary life and “straight talk.” In 2010, Dwight Garner, a New York Times critic, wrote of Hoagland: “Hiserudite comic poems are backloaded with heartache ang longing, and they function, emotionally, like improviseq explosive devices: The pain comes at you from the cruelest angles, on the sunniest of days.” The poems in Turn Up the Ocean examine with an unflinching eye and mordant humour the reality of living and dying in a time and culture that conspire to erase our inner lives. In these poems, perseverance depends on a gymnastics of skepticism and comedy, a dogged quest for authentic connection, and the consolations of the natural world.Why I Like the Hospital — Tony Hoagland Because it is all right to be in a bad mood there, slouching along through the underground garage, riding wordlessly on the elevator with the other customers, staring at the closed beige doors like a prison wall. 1 like the hospital for the way it grants permission for pathos —the mother with cancer deciding how to tell her kids, the bald girl gazing downward at the shunt installed above her missing breast, the crone in her pajamas, walking with an IV pole. I don’t like the smell of antiseptic, or the air-conditioning set on high all night, or the fresh flowers tossed into the wastebasket, but I like the way some people on their plastic chairs break out a notebook and invent a complex scoring system to tally up their days on earth, the column on the left that says, Times I Acted Like a Fool, facing the column on the right that says, Times I Acted Like a Saint. Ilike the long prairie of the waiting; the forced intimacy of the self with the self; each sick person standing in the middle of a field, like a tree wondering what happened to the forest.