English Literature Made Easy for Students

    Wounded Plants by Jagadish Chandra Bose About the Essay This essay is an excerpt from Jagadish Chandra's lecture delivered at the Bose Institute on Feb 07, 1919. It was published in Anand Bazar Patrika on Feb 10, 1919. Jagadish Chandra Bose draws our attention to the fact that our reaction to human tragedy and that of the trees and plants is altogether different.  We are not sympathetic to the plants because they are mute and they cannot cry out their pain. Bose shows that plants also have feelings of happiness and sadness. They also experience birth, growth, and death. The essay sensitizes all of us to develop in us sympathetic attitude towards plants and nature in general. In the first paragraph, the author catches our attention to the damage caused to the vegetative world by wars. He quotes the example of World War I that spread over the whole of Western Europe. The beautiful fields of France and the clear blue sky were under a pall of battle smoke. A dense...

  My Last Duchess by Robert Browning Robert Browning was a great Victorian poet , well known for his robust (vigorous) optimism that is best expressed in his famous lines in his poem ‘Pippa Passes’, ‘God is in His Heaven And all’s well with the world.’ About the Poem ‘My Last Duchess’ is Robert Browning’s one of the most famous poems. It is a dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue is a poem in which the speaker, who is like a protagonist as we have in dramas, is placed in a critical situation. The poet remains aloof (separated) from him. The speaker reacts to the difficult situation and thus lays bare his soul. He reveals his character to the readers or the audience. The presence of a listener or the interlocutor is also felt and it makes the situation dramatic. In this poem, the Duke of Ferrara is the speaker, whose wife is no more now. He is a widower and wants to marry the daughter of a neighbouring Count, from whom he also expects to receive a rich dowry. The C...