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1Q: Give the critical appreciation of the poem “Ballad of the Landlord.” Ans : The central theme of the poem “Ballad of the landlord” is race discrimination. * The poem “Ballad of the Landlord” is one where the poet Langston Hughes paints on a broad canvas the atrocities suffered by black tenants at the hands of their white landlords in America. *In the poem ,the poet presents a simple quarrel between him and the landlord to the condition of the blacks in America. * The poet lives in a rented house. He informs his landlord about the leak in the roof of his house and the condition of the stair leading to his room. He even tells him that he is ready to pay ten bucks money to him if he solved his problems .But the landlord is not at all interested to solve his problems. Finally, the poet lost his long term patience. This results in emotional outburst in the form of anger and he threatens to land a fist on him. This ordinary outburst has been given a racial colour and the landlord frames false and exaggerates charges against him .The police arrest him and send to jail .The judicial system too metes out injustice to him and has awarded him 90 days of jail.* Thus ,the poet draws the picture of exploitation in America where the black people are neglected and oppressed by the white Americans. The condition of the blacks is so poor that they all always under the control of the American people. The police, the judicial system and the newspaper support the whites.* Thus exploitation and oppression which the blacks have to face in America is the major theme of the poem “Ballad of the  Landlord.”

Q2 : Trace the principal issues that Heaney has raised in “ The wife’s Tale.” Ans : The poet, Heany presents the relationship between the husband and the wife in a country farming family in the poem “ The wife’s Tale". Specially the poet portrays the attitude of the wife who feels that she is nothing for her husband.* The wife went out to the paddy field to give lunch to her husband. She spread food on a linen cloth on the ground under hedge. She poured a cup of tea and buttered thick slices of bread for her husband’s choice.  She did everything only to make husband happy with her. When it was all ready she called her husband over to come and have the food that was arrange beautifully. But the husband instructed her to give the other fellows their portion as he was not in a hurry to have it. He neglected his wife’s love and care. He even instructed her to go near the thresher and see herself of things that she has no clear idea. But in spite of her confusion she followed her husband’s instruction to inspect,  once again just to make her husband happy. She went over to the thresher and ran her hands inside the half-filled bags that were hooked to the slots' in the machine. The seeds were hard and cool. The mouths of the bags were open and attached to the channel of the machine white the forks that supported the channel were stuck in the ground. When she came back from the threshing ground,  she noticed that her husband continued to smoke and relax on the ground. At that time, her husband told her that there was good production which would be enough for both crushing and sowing.  She would come and he would come and he would show her yeild, nothing more than that.The wife then felt that she was just a thing , a stranger from another world and as such she gathered her cups and folded the lined cloth and went back. Her husband was still found relaxed under the trees with his limbs spread out, cloth unbuttoned and satiated. She noted that her husband did not notice her. She noticed that despite of the departure,  there was no immediate effect on the part the husband.  * These are the principal issues of the poem “The Wife’s Tale” .

3Q: Describe about the  central theme of the poem “ Modern  Coookery". Ans: The central theme of the poem “ Modern Cookery” is the life of a white husband and a blackish wife .The poet  Okot describes a picture of a modern society in the poem. He narrates a society where generally faminity suffers. * The wife mentioned the change in her husband attitude towards her. She mentioned the different grounds on the basis of which she was rediculed by her husband. She was rejected by her husband because of her cultural trails and behaviour. She was rejected because she didn’t appreciate the white men's food and she didn’t know how to handle even a spoon a fork.*She was also hated by her husband on account of her inability to adapt herself to the western cuisine and food habits. Her husband was also angry with her ignorance the cooking skills of the white women. The anger of the husband was intensified as the wife refused to eat chicken and drink raw eggs like white women. These are the central idea of the poem “Modern Cookery”.4Q: Attempt a critical appreciation of the poem “Wherever I Hang” by Grace Nichols .Ans : The poem “Wherever I Hang” is written by the poet Grace Nichols.* The poet, through this poem, portrays about the experience of immigration and how a person has to receive foreign culture to adjust in foreign country.*The poet also compares the guyanese rustic lifestyle with the English lifestyle.* The poet  left Guyana for England. She left her own people, her land and her home some unknown reason. She also left the hummingbird and the big rats of Guyana. * In England she witnessed the mist covered city of London, the solid building, the colourful wall.At first she felt as if all those were a dream. She touched the colourful walls to see if the were real. She was astonished to see people pouring from the underground transport system ‘The Tube", like beans.She raised her head and noticed the highrise building and palatial structures constructing the vision of the sky.*She gradually adjusted herself the new environment. She took some photographs and spent it to her home, to her native place. She took photograph of hers among the pigeons and the snow without caring for cold. Slowly, she tried to change her old habits in order to cope up with the culture of England. * She got accustomed to the lifestyle of the English people, how to stand in queues, to visit with prior appointments and so on. Yet she felt home sick and missed her people. She didn’t know,to which country she really belonged. She lived a life divided into two sections. She lived in one country and constantly thought of the other. Finally, she came to a conclusion that wherever she fells secure , and safe or wherever she get free space for herself, that’s her own land. Thus, the poem ends with a new resolution. 

Critical appreciation of “  "Koening of the River":   "Koening of the River is an apocalyptic poem on the history of the West Indies, the native country of the poet. This poem first appeared in the London Magazine in March 1990 issue. Like other African and Asian nations the West Indies was also colonized by various European countries like England, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal and America. The people of these colonized countries had to suffer economic exploitation, cultural domination and religious persecution at the hands of the colonial masters. The poet here makes an attempt to relive the colonial past through the memory of a mysterious ghost of a sailor, Koening, of the West Indies. He reappears after a few generations of European travellers and entrepreneurs have come and gone. The route through the river into the West Indies is compared to the journey of the white man into Africa in the past. 

The poem begins on a mysterious note when the ghost of the sailor Koening appears in his small boat on the river many generations after the Europeans have left their colonies. He finds the river port, which during the colonial days remained busy, is now lying completely inoperative. He observes the surrounding land from the deck of his small boat and finds a lonely mule grazing in the field. The mule was not harnessed suggesting that no industrial activity is going on now. Koening observes that where there was once factory wild vegetation has totally covered it. The wheel of the factory is now rusted and its spokes are covered with wild yam vines. Banana plants have been bent with the burden of ripe stacks. These images of nature's plenteousness refers to the natural fertility the native land which was destroyed by the greed of the imperial forces who came and occupied these lands of the natives to set up their industries and mines. They annihilated the natural beauty of the native land. * A pang of conflicting past memories haunt Koening. On one hand he is pained at the memory of the exploitation and injustice the colonized people were subjected to under the colonial rule, on the other hand these colonizers made him familiar with an advanced language and civilization. So Koening is torn between the two aspects of colonialism. Derek Walcott himself has been going through this type of a dilemma in his life as his grandmothers were black and his grandfathers were white from both sides. So he found himself neither here nor there so far as an exclusive identity is concerned. Koening remembers he has escaped the maritime history, the history of exploitation, of taxation and forced labour. The over zealous missionaries came and converted them in to Christianity lost their own belief and cultural identity. The missionaries considered the natives as a savage race and took it upon themselves to civilize them by converting them to Christianity. The poet here makes Koening the spokesperson of the oppressed voice of the colonized masses. However, he also makes an appeal to both the parties-the colonizer and the colonized. To the colonizer his advice is to understanding the land and its inner rhythms instead of making attempts to impose one's political and cultural ideas on it. To the colonized the poet advises that there is no point brooding over the past wrongs and injustices they were subjected to rather one should move ahead shrugging of the past memory. The image of the tongue of a broken bell refers to the debris of the colonial past, reminiscent of a similar outpost in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As Koening muses the colonial history of the West Indies, he is reminded of the role played by the Christian missionaries in sustaining colonization. The bell makes sound only when it has the tongue, just as missionaries helped in sustaining colonization. He is also reminded of the so called burden of the white man that was used to justify Europe's domination over the people of Asia and Africa. The poet exhorts the people of the erstwhile colonies to come out of their colonial pasts and march ahead with mutual respect to each other.