Rewarding understatement in an unseen poem: two answers, one poem
Two candidates answer the same two questions on this unpublished poem.
The banyan has swallowed half the lane; its roots wear coats of dust the sweepers miss. At noon the crows hold court and quarrel there, at dusk the last light settles on its knees. They say it will come down in March - the road must be made wide enough for cars. Nobody has told the crows. Nobody has asked the sweeper where he will rest at noon.
(i) What is the poet's attitude to the tree being cut down? (2 marks) (ii) Comment on the effect of repeating “Nobody” in the last two lines. (2 marks)
Arnab writes for (i): “The poet is very angry with the government and hates cars. He wants to say that development is always bad.” Farhan writes: “The poet never says he is sad. He shows it through small details - the crows' court, the sweeper's rest - and the line about the road sounds like something officials say, not the poet. So the tone is quiet and critical, not angry.” For (ii) Farhan adds: “The repetition of Nobody makes the absence louder.”
1. Allocate the 2 marks for question (i) to each candidate and explain exactly what separates them.
Read the worked answer
Farhan: 2 out of 2. He identifies the attitude (quiet, critical), and more importantly he shows how he knows: the detail about the crows and the sweeper is where the poet's sympathy actually lies, and he notices that “the road must be made wide enough for cars” is reported speech - “They say” - so the poem is quoting the justification rather than endorsing it. That is the whole trick of the poem, and he has found it.
Arnab: 1 out of 2. He has the direction right - the poem is critical of the cutting - and he would keep that mark. The rest is over-reading: nothing in the poem is “very angry” (there is not a single exclamation or direct condemnation), “hates cars” turns a policy into a personal emotion, and “development is always bad” is a slogan imported from outside the text. He is answering a question about a general issue rather than about this poem.
What to say to the class: an attitude question wants two things - the attitude named precisely (admiring, resigned, gently mocking, bitter, celebratory) and the words that prove it. “Angry” is the default word candidates reach for whenever a poem contains a complaint; teach them to test it against diction and punctuation before they use it.
2. Farhan asks whether he may simply write “the poet uses irony” and leave it at that. What do you tell him, and how should the sentence be phrased so that it earns the mark?
Read the worked answer
Tell him that naming a device is the beginning of an answer, not the answer. In a two-mark question the examiner is buying two things: the identification and its working. “The poet uses irony” shows only that he knows a word; it does not show that he has read these eight lines.
Give him a three-step frame to write into his answer: name it → show it in the words → say what it does to the reader.
A worked sentence he can imitate: “The irony is that the officials' language of plain necessity - the road must be made wide enough for cars - sits right beside lives nobody consulted, the crows' court and the sweeper's noon rest; the poet never argues, but the reader feels the cost of the repair.”
Point out why this works: it quotes, it puts two things side by side (the modal “must” against “Nobody has asked”), and it ends on effect rather than on a label. Also warn him against the opposite fault - quoting three lines and never naming the device, which loses the first of the two marks just as surely. A quick drill: give the class one line of the poem and thirty seconds to write a name-show-effect sentence about it; collect three and read them aloud so they hear the difference between a label and an explanation.
3. A third student writes that the repeated “Nobody” is “a simile”, and another says the crows and the tree are “symbols of the environment”. Diagnose both and give the correction you would put on the board.
Read the worked answer
“Nobody” is not a simile. A simile compares two things using like or as; there is no comparison here. What the poem actually uses is repetition with parallel structure - two short sentences, each beginning “Nobody has…”, separated by a full stop. The effect: the absence becomes the loudest thing in the poem, the two sentences slow the ending down, and the full stop between them makes the two omissions feel like separate, deliberate decisions rather than an oversight. The poem then stops without answering its own question, which is where its force comes from.
“Symbols of the environment” is too loose to credit. The tree and the crows are not standing in for an abstraction; they are the concrete things that will be lost, and the poem's power depends on their being ordinary - dust on roots, a quarrel at noon, a sweeper's rest. If a candidate wants to talk about symbolism, they should be able to say what the specific detail stands for and why that detail rather than another. The stronger observation is the personification: the tree “swallows” the lane, roots “wear coats”, the light “settles on its knees” - the tree is treated as a neighbour and a host, which is precisely what makes the March decision feel like an eviction.
Board note: name the device, quote the words, then state the effect. A label without a quotation earns nothing.