Hornbill: The Five Poems

A Photograph is by the English poet Shirley Toulson. It looks at one old print of the poet's mother as a girl and uses it to measure how much time has taken away. NCERT prints the poem in three stanzas, and the textbook's own question tells you what to do with them: each stanza is a different phase of time.

What happens. The poet is holding an old photograph. In it two girl cousins have gone paddling, each holding one of her mother's hands, so that the mother — the big girl — some twelve years or so — stands between them. All three stand still and smile through their hair at the uncle holding the camera. The poet notes that this was before she herself was born, and that the sea, which appears to have changed less, washed their terribly transient feet. In the second phase, some twenty or thirty years later, the mother is alive and grown up, laughing at the old snapshot, naming Betty and Dolly and pointing out how the children were dressed for the beach. In the third phase the mother is dead — dead nearly as many years as that girl in the photograph had been alive — and the poem stops, saying there is nothing to say at all.

The central idea. A photograph freezes one moment so that you can see how far everything has travelled since. Toulson stacks three losses one on top of another. The mother lost her girlhood. The poet lost her mother. And at the end language itself gives up. Each phase is one more step away from that afternoon on the beach.

Tone. The poem cools as it goes. The first phase is warm and observant, almost tender — A sweet face, / My mother's. The second is affectionate but twisted, because the shared laughter is already laughter about something lost. The third is flat and numbed. The poet does not weep; she simply stops speaking.

Devices, and the exact line each one sits in.

• Metonymy — The cardboard shows me how it was. The stiff card mount stands for the photograph itself. Naming the cheap material rather than the picture makes the point that a whole vanished world now survives on a scrap of board. Some answer keys label this synecdoche, since the mount is part of the print; either label earns the mark if you explain the effect.
• Transferred epithet, with alliteration — Washed their terribly transient feet. Feet are not transient; the lives are. The adjective has been shifted onto the feet, and the repeated t-sound makes the phrase land hard.
• Contrast — the sea, which appears to have changed less. Nature set against human life. Notice the word appears: the poet does not claim the sea is unchanging, only that it changes more slowly than we do. That hedge is deliberate and worth quoting.
• Oxymoron — Both wry / With the laboured ease of loss. An ease that takes effort. It describes exactly the practised, light voice people use when they talk about someone they have lost.
• Paradox, built on repeating a root word — Its silence silences. The noun becomes a verb. The silence is not passive; it actively shuts the poet up.
• Free verse and enjambment — The sea holiday / Was her past, mine is her laughter. There is no rhyme scheme, and the sentences run over the line breaks, so the poem sounds like somebody thinking aloud rather than reciting.

For Indian students. The cardboard photograph is instantly familiar — the stiff-mounted black-and-white studio print kept in an almirah or a family album, the kind an older relative pulls out and laughs over. Nothing about the poem's situation is foreign; only the beach is.

Do not get this wrong. The poet is Shirley Toulson. The uncle only holds the camera — he is not a character in any other sense. Betty and Dolly are the two cousins, not the poet's sisters. The mother is never named in the poem, and the poem never states her exact age; it says she was the big girl, some twelve years or so. The poem tells us only that the mother has died — it says nothing about what became of the cousins, so do not write that all three girls are dead.

The Laburnum Top is by the English poet Ted Hughes, who is known for writing about birds and animals with close, unsentimental attention. The poem watches one small event in a garden: a goldfinch flies into a laburnum tree, feeds her young, and flies out again.

What happens. It is a September afternoon. The top of the laburnum is completely still — a few leaves yellowing, all its seeds already fallen. The tree looks finished for the season. Then a goldfinch arrives with a twitching chirrup, A suddenness, a startlement, at a branch end. She slips into the dense leaves, and at once the tree fills with noise: chitterings, a tremor of wings, trillings. She feeds her family, flirts out to a branch-end where the bars across her face are visible, and then, with an eerie thin whistling call, launches away, towards the infinite. The tree goes quiet again and the poem stops.

The central idea. Two living things that need each other. The tree gives the bird shelter and a place to raise her family; the bird gives the tree everything that makes it seem alive. Hughes proves this by allowing the tree no energy of its own — before the bird it is silent, quite still, and after her it subsides to empty. Underneath sits a second idea about how brief such vitality is: the burst of life lasts a few lines and then drains away.

Tone. Watchful and exact rather than sentimental. Hughes never tells you the scene is lovely; he times it. The middle of the poem speeds up, with short phrases piled on one another, and the last line slows right down.

Devices, and the exact line each one sits in.

• Circular structure — a frame — the poem opens with the tree silent, quite still and closes And the laburnum subsides to empty. NCERT asks about this directly. Subsides is the key word: it means settling back down after being lifted, so the ending feels like a fall rather than merely a state.
• Simile — Then sleek as a lizard, and alert, and abrupt. A lizard is smooth and glossy and moves in sudden darts. That is how the bird enters the thick foliage: not gracefully, but quickly and without warning.
• Extended metaphor — the tree as a machine — She enters the thickness, and a machine starts up, then It is the engine of her family, then She stokes it full. The chicks' noise is an engine turning over; the mother is the stoker shovelling in fuel. The image is admiring, not critical — it conveys raw mechanical energy.
• Onomatopoeia — Of chitterings, and a tremor of wings, and trillings, and later eerie delicate whistle-chirrup whisperings. The words themselves make bird noise.
• Alliteration — The whole tree trembles and thrills. The repeated tr- sound gives the line a shiver, which is exactly what it describes.
• Metaphor — Showing her barred face identity mask. The goldfinch's facial markings are read as a mask and as an identity card at the same time: the bars cover her face and identify her. NCERT asks what this phrase means, so give both halves.
• Colour imagery — In the afternoon yellow September sunlight. Yellow ties the whole poem together: the laburnum's flowers, the yellowing leaves, the light, and the gold of the goldfinch.
• Free verse — no rhyme, uneven line lengths, and a final section of a single line, so the poem visibly thins out on the page at exactly the point where the tree empties.

For Indian students. NCERT's own Find out task asks what laburnum is called in your language and which local bird resembles the goldfinch. The tree most Indian students picture is the amaltas, commonly called the Indian laburnum — a different species from the European laburnum Hughes is watching, but with the same drooping golden-yellow flowers and the same effect in a hot month. For the bird, look for a small, brightly marked seed-eater you have actually seen near you; the point of the exercise is your own observation, so answer from what you have noticed rather than copying a name.

Do not get this wrong. Hughes calls the bird she throughout, and the standard reading is that she is feeding her chicks inside the tree. But the poem never describes the chicks — you only hear them. Do not write that the poet sees the young birds.

The Voice of the Rain is by Walt Whitman, the American poet of Leaves of Grass and the writer most associated with free verse in English. The poem is a short conversation: the poet asks the rain who it is, and the rain replies.

What happens. The poet sees a soft-falling shower and asks it, in deliberately old-fashioned language, who it is. To his own surprise the rain answers — strange to tell, he says, meaning that the reply was astonishing — and he tells us that what follows is his translation of what it said. The rain calls itself the poem of the earth. It then describes its own life: it rises invisibly out of the land and the bottomless sea, goes up to the sky, is vaguely formed there, comes back down altogether changed and yet still itself, and washes the dry, dusty world. Without it, everything in the soil would remain seeds only, latent and unborn. Day and night, for ever, it gives life back to the very place it came from, and purifies and beautifies it. Then the poet adds a comment of his own, inside brackets: a song does the same thing — it leaves its birth-place, wanders, and returns with love, whether or not anybody noticed it.

The central idea. Rain and poetry have the same shape. Both begin somewhere, rise, change form, travel, and come home to give life back to their origin — and both do it without asking for credit. Four words carry the meaning and are the ones vocabulary questions keep coming back to: impalpable means something that cannot be touched or felt, lave means to wash or bathe, atomies means tiny particles, latent means hidden or not yet developed.

Tone. Reverent and wondering. The poet is not describing weather; he is listening to it. The rain's own voice is calm, patient and generous — it states what it does without boasting about it.

Devices, and the exact line each one sits in.

• Personification — said the voice of the rain. The rain is given speech and a self. This is the device the entire poem is built on.
• Metaphor — I am the Poem of Earth. The rain defines itself as a poem, which is what allows the comparison at the end to work at all.
• Two voices in dialogue — the poet speaks in And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower and again in the bracketed lines; the rain speaks everything in between. NCERT asks you to identify both voices and quote the lines that show them.
• Paradox — altogether changed, and yet the same. Water leaves as vapour and returns as rain: a different form, the same substance.
• Alliteration — soft-falling shower. The soft s and f sounds suit a gentle shower rather than a downpour.
• Parenthesis — (For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wandering / Reck'd or unreck'd, duly with love returns.) The brackets mark the switch back to the poet's own voice, and they hold the poem's real argument.
• Archaic diction — art thou, whence, form'd, Reck'd or unreck'd. The apostrophes stand for a dropped letter in the past-tense ending. Reck'd means noticed or heeded, so the phrase means whether or not anyone was paying attention.
• Free verse — long, unrhymed, unequal lines that pile clause on clause. This is Whitman's trademark, and it lets the rain's speech run on like the process it is describing.

The water cycle, for NCERT's science question.

A spelling note. The poem prints drouths, Whitman's older spelling of droughts, and form'd and Reck'd with apostrophes. Copy them as printed in your textbook; some reprints modernise the spelling, and either is accepted so long as you are consistent.

Pairs of opposites, which NCERT asks you to list: rise and descend; heaven above and the land or the bottomless sea below; day and night; reck'd and unreck'd; and, in effect, seeds that are latent, unborn against the life the rain gives them.

For Indian students. No country reads this poem more naturally than one that waits for the monsoon. The rain's claim that without it everything would remain seeds only, latent and unborn, is not a metaphor for an Indian farmer — it is a description of the year.

Do not get this wrong. The rain does not speak the last two lines. Those are the poet's own. If you attribute them to the rain, your answer to NCERT's question about the brackets collapses.

Very little is reliably documented about the poet Markus Natten, and nothing about his life is needed for this poem. Do not invent biography for him in an answer — write about the poem. The poem itself is plain in language and very precise about what it claims.

What happens. The speaker asks When did my childhood go? three times over, and hangs a guess on each asking. Was it the day he ceased to be eleven? Was it when he worked out that Hell and Heaven could not be found in Geography, and concluded that therefore they could not exist? Was it when he saw that adults are not what they seem — that they talked of love and preached of love, / But did not act so lovingly? Was it when he found that his mind was really mine, producing thoughts that were his alone rather than borrowed from other people? He never settles on any of them. In the last stanza he changes the question from when to where, and that one he does answer: his childhood went to some forgotten place, hidden in the face of an infant. That, he says, is all he knows.

Structure. Four stanzas. The first three follow an identical design — the same opening question, then a guess at an answer, then the same closing exclamation Was that the day! The last stanza is the shortest, four lines, and it breaks the pattern by changing the question word. That break is where the meaning of the poem lives.

The central idea. Growing up is not a birthday; it is a set of losses, and the poem names three.

1. Reason replaces belief (first stanza). Once the child tests what he has been told against the world, he stops accepting it simply because he was told it.
2. Disillusion replaces trust (second stanza). He notices the distance between what adults say and what adults do.
3. Independence replaces imitation (third stanza). His thoughts become his own.

The third is the clever one. Gaining a mind of your own is obviously a good thing, and yet the poem still counts it as a loss of childhood. Pointing that out lifts an answer above summary: the poem is not simply complaining about growing up, it is admitting that even the gains cost something.

Tone. Puzzled and searching for most of the poem, with a flash of resentment at adults in the second stanza. It ends resigned rather than bitter — That's all I know is an admission of defeat, gently made.

Devices, and the exact line each one sits in.

• Refrain — When did my childhood go? opens the first three stanzas. Repeating a question and never answering it is the point: there was no single day.
• Variation of the refrain — Where did my childhood go? opens the last stanza. Changing one word converts an unanswerable question into an answerable one. Examiners reward candidates who notice this.
• Anaphora — Was it the day…, Was it the time…, Was it when…. Each guess begins the same way, so the guesses stack up like a list.
• Rhetorical questions — the whole poem is built out of them, and none is answered until the final stanza.
• Repetition, with an odd punctuation mark — Was that the day! ends the first three stanzas. It is printed with an exclamation mark, not a question mark, so it sounds less like a genuine enquiry and more like a helpless cry.
• Alliteration and antithesis — Hell and Heaven. Two opposites joined by the h-sound, and both dismissed in the same breath.
• Metaphor — childhood went to some forgotten place. Childhood is treated as a location you can mislay rather than a period you pass through, which is precisely why the switch to where works.
• Symbol — That's hidden in an infant's face. The baby's face stands for innocence itself: the thing still exists in the world, just no longer in him.
• Rhyme — mostly irregular, but the poem uses rhyme where it wants weight: eleven with Heaven in the first stanza, and place with face at the end. That closing rhyme is what gives the last stanza its finality.

Do not get this wrong. The three stanzas map onto NCERT's three words in this order: stanza one is rationalism, stanza two is hypocrisy, stanza three is individuality. Students routinely swap the first and the third. Also, the poet never says he turned twelve; he says he ceased to be eleven, which is a slightly different claim and a good detail to quote precisely.

Father to Son is by the English poet Elizabeth Jennings. The poem is spoken by the father throughout — apart, possibly, from a single line in the last stanza — and it is about a parent who cannot reach a child he has lived with for years.

What happens. A father admits that he does not understand his son, although they have lived in the same house for years. He tries to reach him by building a relationship out of what the boy was like when he was small, and wonders whether he has killed the seed he spent or sown it in land that was never his. The two of them speak like strangers, with no sign of understanding in the air. He then names the contradiction at the centre of his trouble: the boy is built to his design, and yet what the boy loves he cannot share. Silence surrounds them. He confesses that he would rather have a son who went wrong and came home than a son who makes and moves a world of his own — he is ready to forgive, and to shape a new love out of his own sorrow, if only the boy would return. In the last stanza he accepts that the two of them must live on the same globe and the same land. A voice, apparently the son's, says he cannot understand why anger grows from grief. The poem ends with both of them putting out an empty hand, each longing for something to forgive.

What drives the father. Love, certainly — but a love that wants ownership. He speaks of his son as something he manufactured, built to my design, and his idea of repair is the boy returning, not the boy being understood. He never once asks what his son actually wants. His helplessness is genuine and so is his blindness, and a full-mark answer says both rather than only pitying him.

The central idea. The generation gap, seen from the parent's side. The poem argues that the distance is not caused by a quarrel or a betrayal — nothing has actually happened — but by a father wanting his child to remain a child, and by neither of them having the words to cross the gap. It is universal precisely because it is so bare: no names, no place, no date, no incident.

Tone. Bewildered, regretful and increasingly helpless. At the end it softens into something like shared sorrow rather than blame.

Devices, and the exact line each one sits in.

• Dramatic monologue — one continuous speech by the father, opening I do not understand this child. The title tells you the direction of the address.
• Extended metaphor from farming — Yet have I killed / The seed I spent or sown it where / The land is his and none of mine? Fatherhood as sowing. The son is either a crop the father has destroyed or a field that was never his. Both possibilities leave the father with nothing.
• Simile — We speak like strangers. It is not that they refuse to speak; it is that speaking has stopped meaning anything. The line goes on: there's no sign / Of understanding in the air.
• Personification — Silence surrounds us. The silence is treated as a physical thing that has closed in on them both.
• Biblical allusion — I would have / Him prodigal, returning to / His father's house. The reference is to the parable of the prodigal son, who wastes his inheritance and comes home. The father would prefer that son to the one he has, which tells you what he really wants: not his son's happiness but his son's return.
• Contrast — This child is built to my design / Yet what he loves I cannot share. The two halves of the sentence contradict each other, which is exactly the father's problem.
• Symbol and paradox — We each put out an empty hand, / Longing for something to forgive. The hand is offered and it is empty. And to long for something to forgive is to wish a fault into existence, because forgiveness would at least be contact.
• Enjambment across the stanza break — Yet have I killed ends the first stanza and The seed I spent begins the second. The thought will not stay inside its box, which suits a man who cannot finish anything cleanly.

Rhyme scheme. NCERT asks whether it is consistent, and the honest answer is: consistent in pattern, deliberately imperfect in sound. Every stanza is a sestet rhyming ABBABA. The second stanza shows it cleanly — where, mine, sign, air, design, share, in which where, air and share rhyme, and mine, sign and design rhyme. Elsewhere the rhymes are half-rhymes: child, build and killed share only their closing consonants, and so do have, move and love, and so do live, grief and forgive. The shape keeps repeating while the sounds keep almost matching. That is also a fair description of the relationship.

An ambiguity to handle carefully. In He speaks: I cannot understand / Myself, why anger grows from grief, the colon appears to hand the voice to the son. But the I can also be read as the father still speaking. Mention the ambiguity rather than resolving it — the confusion is meant to belong to both of them. What you must not write is that the son speaks the closing lines: the final image, We each put out an empty hand, is in the father's plural.

For Indian students. The parent who has already decided what a child will be — the stream, the course, the career, the marriage — and cannot understand why the child wants something else is a scene most students will recognise from home or from a friend's home. The poem is useful because it lets you see it from the other chair without excusing it.