17. Unseen Poem Comprehension for Class 8

HOLY THURSDAY

HOLY THURSDAY

Is this a holy thing to see

 In a rich and fruitful land,

Babes reduced to misery,

 Fed with cold and usurious hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?

Can it be a song of joy?

And so many children poor?

 It is a land of poverty?

 And their sun does never shine,

And their fields are bleak and bare,

And their ways are filled with thorns :

It is eternal winter there.

 For where the sun does shine,

And here’s the rain does fall,

Babe can never hunger there,

Nor poverty the mind appal.

On the basis of your reading of the poem, answer the following questions as briefly as possible.

 (a) The poet has no patience with the holiness that…

(b) In the first stanza the land is ‘rich and fruitful,’ but in the second stanza, it is ‘of poverty’. It means that…

 (c) The poet writes of the pathetic condition of children in order to …

 (d) And their sun does never shine’ (line 9). What does the poet mean by it ?

 (e) The children’s life is full of misery because …

 (f) ‘It is eternal winter there’ (line 12). The poet means by it as …

(g) The rhyming words in the last stanza are

 (h) Find another word in the poem which means ‘to shock deeply’…

 Answers

(a) can stand the abuse and ill-treatment of children

(b) land cannot be rich where children are ill-treated

(c) attract the attention of the authorities       

(d) There is no joy in their life

(e) they are treated coldly                             

(f) endless desolation

(g) fall; appeal                                                  

(h) appal

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