Unseen Passage and Poem: Awarding Evidence, Not Impressions
At a WBCHSE-affiliated higher secondary school in Birbhum, a Class XII teacher gives a timed 20-mark unseen comprehension test. The prose passage reads: 'For years the house sparrow nested under the tin eaves of our school. Last June, workers replaced the eaves with smooth aluminium. By August the chirping had stopped. The principal called it cleanliness; the biology teacher called it a small extinction. Neither noticed that the children had stopped looking up.' The poem reads: 'Old nest, empty now- / the sky keeps its blue / but not its birds.' A student, Riya, writes: (a) 'The writer is angry at the citizens for cleaning the school,' (b) 'The poem's tone is nostalgic,' and (c) 'The title should be "Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness".' The teacher must give credit only where textual evidence supports it.
1. Evaluate Riya's claim (a). Does the passage support anger at citizens? Rewrite the claim so that it is defensible.
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Riya overreads the passage. The text does not mention citizens at all; it mentions workers, a principal, and a biology teacher. The narrator reports the principal's word 'cleanliness' and the biology teacher's phrase 'a small extinction' without saying either is right. The critical sentence is 'Neither noticed that the children had stopped looking up.' That criticises adult inattention, not public cleanliness. The strongest support is for irony and elegy: smooth aluminium replaces tin eaves, chirping stops, and the children's attention shifts. A defensible rewrite: 'The writer is ironic about adults who call environmental loss cleanliness while missing its effect on children.' This keeps the textual focus on the principal, the biology teacher, and the children's changed behaviour.
2. Explain how the poem's last two lines create tone. Is 'nostalgic' an adequate label?
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'The sky keeps its blue / but not its birds' uses a turn: the sky's permanence is conceded, then narrowed by 'but not its birds.' The tone is not simply nostalgic, because nostalgia implies warm longing for a past that remains pleasing. Here the visual beauty of the blue sky remains, but the living element is absent. 'Old nest, empty now' establishes absence before the sky is mentioned. The effect is elegiac and restrained: the poem mourns a small loss without sentimentality. 'Nostalgic' is partly adequate because the nest is old and the speaker remembers, but it misses the sharpness of 'not its birds.' A fuller label would be 'elegiac' or 'quietly accusing.'
3. Suggest a better title for the prose passage than Riya's (c), and justify it in two or three sentences.
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A better title is 'The Small Extinction' or 'What the Eaves Knew.' 'The Small Extinction' works because the biology teacher's phrase is the passage's moral centre: the loss is small in scale but real, and the title makes the reader weigh that paradox. 'What the Eaves Knew' works because the tin eaves sheltered the sparrows and were then replaced; the title implies that the building itself witnessed the loss. Riya's title is inappropriate because it borrows a moral proverb about cleanliness and turns an environmental elegy into a approving slogan. A title should not contradict the passage's irony.