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Question 1.
Notice the use of the word
‘turn’ in the first line, “I think I could turn and live with animals…”. What
is the poet turning from?
Answer:
In this line here, the poet wants to turn from human into an animal. This
turning is symbolic of the poet’s detachment from human beings and their
nature and his appreciation of the animal kind.
Question 2.
Mention three things that
humans do and animals don’t.
Answer:
Animals do not cry and complain over their conditions. They do not. commit
sins and therefore do not weep for them. They are also very satisfied
creatures and have no desire to possess material things. Humans, on the
contrary, complain all the time, commit all sorts of sins and are affected
with the madness of owning things.
Question 3.
Do humans kneel to other humans who lived thousands of years ago? Discuss this
in groups.
Answer:
Yes, humans kneel to other humans who lived thousands of years ago as it is
a cultural tradition to do so. (Students can discuss their own culture with
their classmates and share the rituals and traditions of their culture and
also get to know about other cultural practices.)
Question 4.
What are the ‘tokens’ that
the poet says he may have dropped long ago, and which the animals have kept
for him? Discuss this in class .
(Hint
Whitman belongs to the Romantic tradition that includes Rousseau and
Wordsworth,which holds that civilisation has made humans false to their own
true nature.
What could be the basic
aspects of our nature as living beings that humans choose to ignore or
deny?)
Answer:
The tokens mentioned in the poem mean the symbols of the true nature of
human beings. These tokens are actually tokens of virtue such as containment,
honesty, innocence and the likes of it.