Book page 88 & 89 Updated on2026-09-05
True.
Count the homes named in the poem. It “lived first in a little house” (the egg-shell), it “lived next in a little nest” of straw, and “at length” it “flew beyond the tree” into the open world. Shell → nest is the first change, nest → the wide world is the second.
False.
The last two lines say the exact opposite: “I don't know how the world is made, / And neither do my neighbours.” The neighbours cannot tell the bird anything, because they do not know either.
Its mother lived in the nest along with the baby bird.
The line “And nestled by my mother” tells us that the mother bird settled the chick warmly in the straw nest and stayed with it. That is why the chick “nor needed any other” — with its mother beside it, it wanted nothing more.
B. its nest was made of straw
The chick had never left the nest, so the straw of the nest was the only thing it had ever seen or touched — and it took that for the whole world.
The word is ‘nestled’.
To be nestled is to be settled snugly and safely in a soft place. When the poem says the world was “nestled by my mother”, we can picture the chick tucked warmly under her feathers in the straw.
Because the first time it came out of the nest, leaves were all it could see.
The bird “fluttered from my nest, / To see what I could find”. It landed on the branches of its own tree, and from there the green leaves filled its view in every direction. Having never gone further, it once again decided that whatever it could see was the whole world.
C. spoke
‘Said’ is the past form of ‘say’, and to say something is simply to speak it. The bird is not shouting or crying here — it is quietly telling us what it decided about the world.
The bird felt that it had been very blind because it could not see the leaves from inside the nest.
Three dashes → s-e-e. Six dashes with an n second and an e last → i-n-s-i-d-e.
Because its first world was an egg — and an egg is small, round and pale blue.
Before it hatched, the bird lived inside the shell: “I lived first in a little house, / And lived there very well.” The curved shell was the only thing it could see and touch, so it naturally decided that “the world was small and round, / And made of pale, blue shell.”
It went out on to the leafy branches of its own tree, just outside the nest.
The poem says, “One day, I fluttered from my nest, / To see what I could find, / I said the world is made of leaves.” It did not fly far — it had not yet learnt to fly properly, it only fluttered. That is why everything it found was leaves. Flying beyond the tree comes only in the last stanza, when it is grown up.
It said it was “quite fit for grown-up labours” — that is, it had grown strong and capable enough to do the hard work of an adult bird.
The quality is maturity and self-reliance. It no longer needs its mother to feed it or the nest to hold it; it can find its own food, build its own home and look after itself.
The bird's neighbours are the other birds and creatures that live in the same tree and the trees nearby — sparrows, parrots, crows, squirrels, and the grown-up birds that hatched before it.
Two clues point to this. First, the bird has spent its whole life in one tree, so ‘neighbours’ must mean the ones sharing that tree. Second, the line is “I don't know how the world is made, / And neither do my neighbours” — it compares itself with them as equals, which only makes sense if they are creatures like itself.
A second reading is also defensible, and worth mentioning in the discussion: the poem is really about all of us, so the ‘neighbours’ may stand for everyone else in the world, human beings included. Read that way, the last line says that no one — bird or person — fully understands how the world is made. That is the stronger and more interesting reading, because it turns a small poem about a chick into a poem about growing up.