Hi Guys...urgent help required! Please help me.

[Nikhar]

Hey everyone.... I have my English exam day after tomorrow and well, to be truthful, I haven't been attentive enough in the classes.:redface:


Can you please help me and explain the two poems in the threads below:-

http://online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?p=766060#post766060

http://online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?p=766058#post766058


Any help would be greatly apprciated.
Thanks in advance. :)

[Maximilianus]

My humble interpretation of the first poem tells me that the author is trying to tell us to stop doing all we've been doing wrong, not to stop completely, but to slow down, to watch whatever surrounds us with a different view, and acquire a different behavior towards life (like the stanza telling fishermen to stop killing the whales). In the end it suggests that if all of us stop at the same time, that big silence would give us a chance to see the damage we have caused.

(I hope this to be good for something. I'll read the other one shortly :))

[Nikhar]

Thanks a ton for your help. It greatly helped me. Thanks again. :)

[Maximilianus]

No problem, Nik, I'm glad to be of any help :D

As for the second poem, "An Elementary School Classroom in a slum", I've been reading it several times and though it is, generally, one of the saddest depictions of extreme poverty that I've read so far, the following lines are the ones I consider an answer if you are asked who the poem is talking about:

"...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 are foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom."

I believe the previous lines give a general good imagery of how slum children look like, if you're a looking for a description of them within the poem. On the other hand the lines:

"...Where all their future's painted with a fog,
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky,
Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words."
give us a clear idea of the contaminated environment where they live (I've seen much of this in our own slums everywhere in my homeland).
Other than that, the final stanza appears as a message to people who can do something to give these children a better future. Especially the lines that talk about "...letting their tongues run naked into books" and "History is theirs whose language is the sun" are telling, in my humble opinion, that education and knowledge are the only remaining hope that slum children can embrace, in order to get themselves a better future. I believe the final message is "to give children a chance in life through education".

Again, it's my humble interpretation, so I hope it to be okay. Good luck in your exam :thumbs_up
By the way, can I ask who the authors of both poems are?

[Nikhar]

Hey...thanks a lot. :)


Keeping Quiet is by Pablo Neruda.
An Elementary School Classroom... is by Stephen Spender.

[Maximilianus]

Hey...thanks a lot. :)
Welcome :D

Keeping Quiet is by Pablo Neruda.
An Elementary School Classroom... is by Stephen Spender.
Thank you too :D

Later on tell me how you did in your exam, okay?

[Nikhar]

Hey...the exam was good.

I had to explain "History is theirs whose language is the sun".

[Maximilianus]

Glad you did well!!! :) :D