BEGC 109 British Romantic Literature Solved Question Paper June 2026 for IGNOU BA (Honours) English (BAEGH)

Block 1, Unit 3 20 marks Blake in only 2 of 7 papers

Question 3: Comment on the contrasting images of God as presented in Blake's 'The Tyger' and 'The Lamb'. (20)

Introduction. William Blake (1757 to 1827) printed Songs of Innocence in 1789 and joined it to Songs of Experience in 1794, with the subtitle 'Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul'. 'The Lamb' belongs to Innocence and 'The Tyger' to Experience. Both poems ask the same question, who made you, yet they reach very different pictures of the Creator.

Blake meant the two to be read together. The lamb and the tiger are not only animals; they are two ways of seeing God. One sees a gentle shepherd who becomes a child. The other glimpses a mighty, almost frightening craftsman whose purpose cannot be known.

The God of 'The Lamb'. The speaker is a child, and the poem opens like a Sunday-school catechism:

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

The maker described in the first stanza is a provider. He gives the lamb life, food 'By the stream & o'er the mead', soft wool that is 'Clothing of delight', and a 'tender voice' that makes 'all the vales rejoice'. The creation is pastoral, safe and full of joy.

In the second stanza the child answers his own question with complete confidence:

He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:

This is Christ, the Lamb of God of the Gospels, who took human form. God here is close, humble and loving. Creator, child and lamb share one name, 'We are called by his name', so there is no distance between maker and made. The poem ends in blessing: 'Little Lamb God bless thee.'

The form supports this image. Two ten-line stanzas, rhyming couplets, gentle repetition and simple words give the poem the sound of a hymn or nursery song. Question and answer are both present, so the reader feels certainty and comfort.

The God of 'The Tyger'. The speaker of Experience asks a question that is never answered:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

The tiger is fire set against darkness, beautiful and dangerous at once. 'Fearful symmetry' joins terror and perfect design, and the line forces us to think about a Creator able to make something so deadly and so splendid.

Blake imagines God as a blacksmith working at a forge: 'What the hammer? what the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil? what dread grasp, / Dare its deadly terrors clasp!' This God is not a shepherd but an artisan of enormous strength, and the hammering questions copy the blows of his work.

He is also distant. The poem asks 'In what distant deeps or skies' the fire of the eyes burned, and 'On what wings dare he aspire? / What the hand, dare seize the fire?' The images recall Prometheus stealing fire and suggest a Creator who is daring, remote and sublime rather than meek.

The central stanza. The fifth stanza carries the whole contrast:

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

The stars throwing down their spears may echo the fall of the rebel angels in Milton. The final line is the key question of both poems. If one God made the gentle lamb and the terrible tiger, then God holds both love and fearful power, and the simple faith of Innocence is no longer enough.

The last stanza repeats the first with one change: 'Could frame' becomes 'Dare frame'. The question moves from ability to audacity. The speaker is now less curious about how God made the tiger and more awed that he would dare to.

Points of contrast. First, the God of 'The Lamb' is known and named, while the God of 'The Tyger' stays a mystery behind unanswered questions. Second, one God comes down and becomes a child; the other works far off 'in distant deeps or skies'. Third, one is meek and mild; the other is fearful energy.

Fourth, the imagery differs sharply. 'The Lamb' uses stream, meadow, wool and a tender voice. 'The Tyger' uses forest, night, fire, hammer, chain, furnace and anvil, the language of the industrial forge that Blake, a working engraver in London, knew well. Fifth, the rhythm of 'The Lamb' is soft, while the short, stressed lines of 'The Tyger' beat like a hammer.

Blake's idea of contraries. Blake did not want readers to choose one God over the other. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he wrote 'Without Contraries is no progression' and 'Energy is Eternal Delight'. The lamb shows divine love and the tiger divine energy; a full vision of God needs both.

Innocence sees only gentleness and is untested. Experience sees power and doubt but has lost trust. Blake stands above both states and asks the reader to hold them together. That is why 'The Tyger' refers back to the lamb, and why the pair works better than either poem alone.

Conclusion. 'The Lamb' presents a tender, approachable God who shares the nature of his creatures, while 'The Tyger' presents a mighty, mysterious and daring Creator whose work inspires awe and fear. Through these contrasting images Blake questions easy religious answers and suggests that the divine includes both meekness and terrifying energy.

Block 3 20 marks Keats in every paper since Dec 2024

Question 9: Attempt a critical appreciation of Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale'. (20)

Introduction. John Keats (1795 to 1821) wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale' in Hampstead in May 1819, the spring of his great odes. It first appeared in Annals of the Fine Arts in July 1819 and was collected in his 1820 volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.

The poem came from a hard year. Keats had nursed his brother Tom, who died of tuberculosis in December 1818, and his own health and money worries were growing. According to his friend Charles Brown, Keats wrote the ode after listening to a nightingale that nested near Brown's house.

Theme. The ode is about the wish to escape a world of pain and death into the timeless beauty of the bird's song, and about the failure of that escape. It sets joy against suffering, imagination against reality and the immortal song against the mortal listener.

Stanza 1: the drowsy ache. The poem opens with a strange mixture of pain and pleasure: 'My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk'. The poet is not envious of the bird; he is 'too happy in thine happiness'. The nightingale, a 'light-winged Dryad of the trees', sings of summer 'in full-throated ease'.

Stanza 2: the wish for wine. Keats first tries to reach the bird through intoxication: 'O, for a draught of vintage!' He longs for 'a beaker full of the warm South', wine 'Tasting of Flora and the country green', so that he might 'leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim'. The images are rich in taste, colour and warmth.

Stanza 3: the world he wants to leave. This stanza names what drives the longing: 'The weariness, the fever, and the fret / Here, where men sit and hear each other groan'. Old age shakes 'a few, sad, last gray hairs', and 'youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies', a line many readers link with Tom's death. Here beauty and love cannot last beyond tomorrow.

Stanza 4: the flight of poetry. Keats rejects wine: 'Away! away! for I will fly to thee, / Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, / But on the viewless wings of Poesy'. Imagination succeeds for a moment ('Already with thee! tender is the night'), but the forest is dark, lit only by moonlight filtering through the leaves.

Stanza 5: seeing in the dark. Unable to see the flowers at his feet, the poet guesses each scent in the 'embalmed darkness': white hawthorn, eglantine, violets and 'the coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, / The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.' This is Keats's sensuous art at its height, with smell, touch, taste and sound blending into one experience.

Stanza 6: the pull of death. 'Darkling I listen; and, for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death'. Dying 'upon the midnight with no pain' while the bird pours out its soul seems rich and fitting. Yet Keats sees the irony at once: dead, he would hear nothing, and the song would sing over 'a sod'.

Stanza 7: the immortal bird. 'Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!' The individual bird will die, but its song, heard by 'emperor and clown' in ancient days and by Ruth 'amid the alien corn', lives on. The stanza ends on 'magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn', an image of pure romance.

Stanza 8: the return. The word 'forlorn' breaks the spell: 'Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!' The poet admits that 'the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam'd to do'. The song fades over meadow, stream and hill, and the poem closes on a question: 'Do I wake or sleep?'

Major ideas. First, the ode dramatises the limits of imagination. Wine, poetry and even death are tried as routes of escape, and none holds. Second, it shows the Romantic tension between the ideal and the real: the bird stands for permanent beauty and art, while the poet stands for human mortality.

Third, the poem reflects what Keats in an 1817 letter called 'Negative Capability', the power of resting in uncertainty without reaching irritably after fact and reason. The ode does not resolve its tensions. It leaves the reader, like the poet, between waking and dreaming.

Imagery and language. Keats packs the ode with sensuous detail. Synaesthesia appears in wine 'Tasting of Flora', in 'embalmed darkness' and in 'verdurous glooms'. Classical references (hemlock, Lethe, Dryad, Hippocrene, Bacchus) sit beside the Biblical Ruth and medieval 'faery lands', giving the bird's song a reach across all of history.

Form. The poem has eight stanzas of ten lines in iambic pentameter, with a shorter three-stress eighth line in each stanza. The rhyme scheme ababcdecde joins a Shakespearean quatrain to a Petrarchan sestet, a form Keats built for his odes. The short line creates a pause and a sense of falling away, which suits the poem's mood.

Tone. The tone moves from drowsy ache to longing, to dark sorrow, to ecstasy, to attraction towards death and finally to bewildered return. The changes are carefully placed, and the repetition of 'forlorn' from the end of stanza 7 to the start of stanza 8 is one of the finest turns in English lyric poetry.

Conclusion. 'Ode to a Nightingale' is a meditation on beauty, suffering and mortality. Keats uses the bird to explore the desire for permanence and the pain of returning to a world where 'youth grows pale'. Its rich imagery, controlled form and unresolved ending make it one of the highest achievements of Romantic poetry and a text every BEGC-109 student must know closely.