Page 1 - Assignment

1. Read the extract given below and answer the questions that follow:1x4=4

i. Far far from gusty waves these children’s faces
like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor:

a) Which children are referred to here?
b) Explain ‘far far from gusty waves’
c) Explain ‘rootless weeds’ .Identify the literary device.

ii. On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare’s head,
Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.
Belled, flowery, Tyrolese Valley.
Open-handed map awarding the world its world.

a) What is the colour of the walls symbolic of?
b) Which two worlds does the poet hint at?
c) What are ‘donations’?
d) Why is the map ‘open-handed’?

iii. And yet, for these children, these windows,
not this map, their world,
Where all their future’s painted with a fog,
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky

a) Who are these children?
b) What is ‘their world’ for these children?
c) What future is in store for these children?
d) What does ‘lead sky’ symbolize?

iv. On their slag heap,these children
wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
with mended glass,like bottle bits on stones
all of their time and space foggy slum

a) Who are these children?
b) Explain “skin peeped through by bones”
c) What is their slag heap?
d) What does with mended glass mean?

v. Break O break open till they break the town
and show the children to green fields, and
Run azure on gold sands make their world
History theirs whose language is the sun.

a) What should they break?
b) What kind of a world does the poet imagine for these children?
c) What does the word ‘sun’ symbolize?