Hi Everyone!! This article will share Earth Song Questions & Answers.
This poem is written by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In my previous posts, I have shared the questions and answers of Payeng The Forest Man of India, You Can No Longer Reach Me Said The Sky and The Watery Place so, you can check these posts as well.
Earth Song Questions & Answers
Word Galaxy
- Endures – continues to exist for a long time
- Abide – stay to live in one place, accept and act according to a law
- Shaggy – long and untidy (here, overgrown with vegetation)
- Heritors – inheritors (heir)
- Mound – a large pile of stones
Question 1: Choose the correct option:
(a) According to the speaker (here, the earth) humans worry about
Answer: whatever belongs to them and their families alone.
(b) People ensure that their ownership of land and property is well defines through
Answer: legal deeds
(c) The speaker wants to show that our pride in all that we possess
Answer: is futile in the face of death
(d) Humans try to control the earth and what it yields with their
Answer: deeds
(e) The speaker, the earth tries to show that
Answer: i. our pride of possession is futile
ii. The earth will outlive everyone
iii. The earth cannot be controlled
Question 2: Read and answer the questions:
I who have seen much
Such have I never seen.
(a) Who is the speaker in these lines?
Answer: The earth is the speaker in these lines.
(b) How has the speaker seen much?
Answer: The speaker has seen a lot since it has existed from the time the world came into being.
(c) What has the speaker not seen?
Answer: The speaker expresses surprise at the ways humans want to enforce ownership over land. He says that these are the kinds of people he has not seen in ages prior. At that time, people were not so obsessed about their possessions.
Question 3: Read and answer the questions:
To them, and to their heirs
Who shall succeed…..
(a) Who are ‘them’?
Answer: ‘Them’ are the people being referred to who prepare elaborate deeds for their successors.
(b) What are they bothered about?
Answer: They are bothered about their materialistic possessions being inherited by their rightful owners and no one else.
(c) What is the speaker trying to show?
Answer: The speaker is trying to show how this kind of a quest by man is futile. In the end, one must go. Therefore, everlasting control and ownership is meaningless.
Earth Song Questions & Answers
Question 4: Read and answer the questions:
Fled like the flood’s foam.
The lawyer, and the laws,
And the Kingdom,
Clean swept herefrom.
(a) What does ‘fled like the flood’s foam’ mean?
Answer: ‘Fled like the flood’s foam’ means that just as the foam over a flood of water vanishes in a second, the people have also come and gone in great rapidity.
(b) What is the ‘foam’ a metaphor for?
Answer: The ‘foam’ is a metaphor for the lawyers, the laws and the kingdom who have all come and gone over the ages.
(c) The lines mention the lack of performance of……
Answer: humankind and their obsessive need to control and possess resources.
Question 5: Humans have a false pride in themselves and their possessions. They also claim to have a power over the earth. But they are not aware of the truth of the cycle of the life and death. Explain with reference to the poem.
Answer: The false pride of humans and their own knowledge of their limitations is beautifully highlighted in the poem. The earth talks about its permanence and that of the stars. This is contrasted against man’s narrow desires to call different objects his or that of others. Man tries to create deeds and other legal instruments to pass on control from one generation to the other. However, his knowledge of the cycle of life and death is not complete, as nature wipes out one generation after the other, begging the question of where the inheritors really are.
Question 6: In the lines, they cannot hold me/but I hold them, who does the earth hold and how? Discuss the relationship of ours with the earth on which we live.
Answer: The earth holds all the people as, in life or even after death, some part of them remains on the earth. The people return to earth as dust and matter, leaving a part of themselves behind in the planet for all eternity. They don’t hold the earth in any way. It is the earth that holds them. The poem explains in a simple way how man’s quest to exert permanence and control over the earth is futile. It is the earth which provides, nourishes and remains the one who controls over decades and centuries. This is the kind of relationship shared between the earth and man.
So, these were Earth Song Questions & Answers.