English for Life Grade 12 Learner’s Book Home Language. Lynne Southey
seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride. (4)
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d,
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green. (8)
Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceiv’d;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceiv’d: (12)
For fear of which, hear this thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.
[Public Domain]
Post-reading:
Questions
1. How long has the speaker known the friend and how do you know?
2. What is implied in the word ‘seems’?
3. What is meant by ‘fresh’?
4. The word ‘three’ is used four times. What effect does this have on the meaning?
5. Analyse the following lines by answering the questions below them.
Three winters cold,
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d,
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,
a. What do the first two lines mean?
b. What is the connection between April and perfumes?
c. What figure of speech is used to express the passing years?
6. What is implied by the ‘Ah! yet’?
7. What figure of speech is used in the third quatrain? Explain it.
8. What is implied by ‘methinks’ and which earlier word is linked to it?
9. Look at the last line of the third quatrain and explain what the speaker is actually saying to the friend.
10. Who is the poet/speaker addressing in the last two lines?
11. What is he saying to whomever he is addressing?
Your teacher will go through the answers with the class.
A short story
Lionel Abraham, a South African author and literary figure, was responsible for bringing Herman Charles Bosman’s stories to the public, and received many awards for his contributions to literature during his life (1928-2004). He was born of immigrant Jewish parents and suffered from cerebral palsy. He was confined to a wheelchair until the age of 11 and was obliged to take to it again at the age of 66.
His short story in the activity below is unusual in that it doesn’t really tell a story. A chance meeting recalls to the mind of the narrator, Felix, incidents from his childhood, about which he reminisces. We are not given much information about the setting or the characters and have to fill this in for ourselves.
Activity 3.7 - Reading a short story (individual and group)
Pre-reading:
Skim the story looking for the usual features: characters, setting and theme.
Listen while your teacher reads the story to you or read it silently to yourself. During reading, focus on making sense of the narrative.
Enemy
by Lionel Abrahams (1928-2004)
A strange elation overtook Felix a few minutes after he had bumped into Willem Prinsloo one day in town. Over the years, chance meetings with other former fellow-inmates of the Home had usually rather depressed him, reminding him too keenly of how disliked he had felt there (‘unpopular’ was the word used then), how often displaced and endangered. Yet Willem Prinsloo was the bully he had particularly hated and feared, while most of the other boys in the senior section for children over fourteen had shared his feelings, had been his allies against the tyrant.
His throat contracted when he recognised the robust man limping toward him across Harrison Street with a young woman on his arm. He had often toyed with fantasies of facing Willem in the grown-up world, but now that it was really about to happen he did not know what to expect. He was trembling a little as he spoke the first words of greeting.
‘Willem … Hullo. How goes it?’
‘No, it’s okay with me, thanks. And you?’
The perfectly civil answer amounted to a reprieve, and not now needing to escape, Felix dared, ‘And what are you doing nowadays?’
‘Oh, diamond cutting, you know …’ There was no sarcasm, though Felix ought to have remembered, that being the trade many of the boys became apprenticed to. Then, unprompted, Willem added, ‘This is my wife.’
And so, with a minute of cool politeness while they waited for a robot’s permission to move on, the encounter passed and they walked away from each other. Perhaps it was simply relief that accounted for the elation that now swept Felix up. There had been, on Willem’s part, none of the old harshness or rudeness or menace, and no sign of recrimination – and this softening might have had to do with his wife’s presence, the public place, or some ten years of forgetting. But on his own part, Felix was surprised to discover a complete freedom from bitterness. So there was more to his little euphoria than just relief. That decade-old toxic element in his memories of Willem seemed suddenly to have been neutralised. He allowed himself a fanciful regret that he had not invited the pair to join him for coffee in a nearby tea-room, so that once more after so long he and Willem might partake at the same table. How different it would have seemed, how delicious the contrast with those many meals at the long tables when all he wished from Willem was not to be noticed by him.
Why had he been so daunted? It must have been some particular degree of unripeness in his adolescent outlook that had induced him to hug his fear and caricature Willem into a monster. Reflecting now on the face he had just re-encountered, Felix found no quality there, after all, that necessarily bespoke brutality and arrogance. Those quick-moving eyes under the brow that so readily rumpled in heavy frowns, need not seem fierce or suspicious. He recalled noticing just such features on someone he knew only as mild and tractable.
And Willem’s gestures and habits also appeared in a new light. Even the way, with his grin or laugh, his tongue-tip would protrude, pressed against his lower lip as though to restrain his eagerness, keeping the curve wet and hungry-looking, had lost its malign aspect. Felix had recognised that old habit, when it had reappeared while they chatted, with something like a secret greeting for himself.
But he could remember how in the old days when Willem Prinsloo laughed, when his tongue-tip showed and his bull voice leaped up the scale into a shrieking giggle, smaller boys would melt with terror. It made Felix smile. What queer exaggerations had stifled their reason and moused their courage. How grossly their lack of perspective had distorted reality.
In the hierarchy of physical strength that framed the society of thirty or forty boys at the Home, Willem Prinsloo’s place was at the summit. Felix’s was usually near the bottom. The only boys on whom he could impose his will were bed-patients – like Nemus Marais who was paralysed from his chest down and who died during his second winter there. He was a thoughtful, older boy with gentle manners whom Felix liked to chat with and play at chess, drafts or Chinese checkers. Yet from time to time he could not resist teasing Nemus for a little, pretending