Read the stanza given below and answer the questions that follow each:
While greedy good-doers, beneficent beasts of prey,
Swarm over their lives enforcing benefits
That are calculated to soothe them out of their wits,
And by teaching them how to sleep they sleep all day,
Destroy their sleeping at night the ancient way.
1. Who are these greedy good-doers? Why are they greedy?
2. Where would they crowd?
3. What is the special quality of the city people?
4. How do they harm to poor rural people?
5. Who are these ‘beasts of prey’ in the first line?
1. These greedy good-doers are the city people. They think only of their own benefits.
2. They would crowd around the poor rural people.
3. The city people cunningly calculate how to derive their benefits.
4. They misguide the poor villagers and deprive them of their sleep.
5. The city people are the beasts of prey.
Read the stanza given below and answer the questions that follow each:
Sometimes I feel myself I can hardly bear The thought of so much childish longing in vain,
The sadness that lurks near the open window there
That waits all day in almost open prayer.
1. What ‘I’ stands for in these lines?
2. What does the speaker call his thoughts?
3. What is the open prayer from near the open window?
4. Why does sadness lurk near the open window there?
Read the stanza given below and answer the questions that follow each:
For the squeal of brakes, the sound of a stopping car,
Of all the thousand selfish cars that pass, Just one to inquire what a farmer’s prices are.
And one did stop, but only to plow up grass
In using the yard to back and turn around;
And another to ask the way to where it was bound
1. Who went and wait in the lines and why?
2. Why are the passing cars called ‘selfish cars’?
3. Why did the first car stop there?
4. What did any other car that stopped, ask about?
Read the stanza given below and answer the questions that follow each:
And another to ask could they sell it a gallon gas
They couldn’t (this crossly); they had none, didn’t it see?
No, in country money, the country scale of gain,
The requisite lift of spirit has never been found
Or so the voice of the country seems to complain.
1. What did one car rider want to buy from the villagers?
2. Who are the people referred in these lines?
3. What was never found in the city people?
4. What does the voice of the country seem to say?
Read the stanza given below and answer the questions that follow each:
I can’t help owning the great relief it would be
To put these people at one stroke out of their pain.
And then next day as I come back into the sane,
I wonder how I should like you to come to me
And offer to put me gently out of my pain.
1. Who is the speaker of these lines?
2. Who are these people referred to here?
3. Who can at one stroke put these people out of their pain?
4. How will the poet feel a great relief?
