NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 2 A Friend's Prayer — Let us think and reflect

The correct summary, with the right word chosen at every place:

The poet says a prayer for friendship and friends. She wants that friendship should always be an important part of her complete life. She says that her friendship makes her feel special. She wishes to do the best she can, for her friends. She wants to listen to the wishes of her friends. As a good friend, she prays that she is able to make her friends' wishes come true. She wants her heart to understand what a true friend is. She prays that she loves her friends as they are. She tells us that true friends accept their friends for all their qualities.

Blessed.

The poem says, “With special friends I feel I'm blessed” — that is, she feels lucky, thankful, as if her friends were a gift from God.

Heart.

“Let me use my heart to see, / To realise what friends can be…” — she wants to judge friends by feeling, not by their looks or their usefulness.

Answer: B. caring

The speaker is not satisfied with merely listening to her friends' “hopes and plans”; she wants to work so that their wishes come true — “I'll try all that a friend can do”. Thinking about others' wishes before your own is exactly what caring means.

By trying hard.

The poem's own words are, “I'll try all that a friend can do / To make their wishes come true.” She promises to try everything that lies within a friend's power — she does not promise a fixed amount of work.

My friends will feel happy if their wishes come true.

Other good words for the blank: delighted, thrilled, blessed, grateful. Any word that names a pleasant feeling is correct.

The line is: “Let me use my heart to see”.

The heart stands for our feelings, while the eyes stand for what we merely look at from outside. By asking to see with her heart, the speaker is saying that a friend can be understood only through feeling — through love and sympathy — and not by judging appearances.

Answer: B. thoughtful

In these four lines the speaker is thinking deeply about what a friend truly is — she wants to understand with her heart, to avoid quick judgements, and to accept people as they are. That careful, considerate thinking is what ‘thoughtful’ means.

The speaker does not wish to make any judgements. She cares for them just as they are.

The word comes straight from the poem — “And make no judgements from afar”. To judge from afar is to form an opinion about someone without really knowing them.

We can call it a prayer because the poet does not state things — she asks for them, in the humble language of prayer.

The very first words are “May my friendships always be…”, and later come “So let me give my very best” and “Let me use my heart to see”. ‘May…’ and ‘Let me…’ are the forms we use when we request a blessing from God, not when we make a plan for ourselves. The title itself, A Friend's Prayer, confirms this.

Because she believes that simply sharing her friends' hopes is not enough — a true friend must also act.

Her words are, “I want to do much more than share / The hopes and plans of friends who care.” To listen and sympathise costs nothing; she wants to “try all that a friend can do / To make their wishes come true”. She also feels she owes them this, since their friendship has made her feel “blessed” — so she must “give my very best” in return.

Yes, she certainly knows them.

Two lines prove it. First, she says she already shares “the hopes and plans of friends who care” — you can share a plan only if it has been told to you. Second, she promises “to make their wishes come true”; nobody can fulfil a wish that is unknown to them.

Her friends confide in her because she listens with her heart and never judges them. That is the reason she knows their wishes in the first place.

This is your own answer, so say honestly whether you pray, when you do it, and what you ask for. A good answer names one particular friend and one particular wish.