I believe the correct answer is: "Work without Hope" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
An epigraph in literature represents a phrase, quotation, or poem at the beginning of a literary work as a link to the wider literary canon, which has the function of either inviting the comparison or to enlist a conventional context.
The epigraph in Kamala Markandaya’s novel “Nectar in a Sieve” (1954) is:
“Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.”
This epigraph and the title of Markandaya’s novel represent last two verses of "Work without Hope" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and, therefore, allude and converse to that literary work. However, the epigraph does not answer the question of whether the characters actually have hope.
