NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 3 Paper Boats — Let us think and reflect
Book page 112 & 113 Updated on2026-09-05
Q1.
I 1. Extract: 'When night comes I bury my face in my arms and dream that my paper boats float on and on under the midnight stars. The fairies of sleep are sailing in them, and the lading is their baskets full of dreams.' (i) Select the option that is most likely to be the speaker as per the extract. (Four pictures are given: A, B, C and D.)
Answer
Option A — the figure lying curled up on its side with the head bent down and the face hidden in the folded arms, on the pillow.
Picture
What it shows
Does it match the line?
A
Lying curled on the side, arms drawn up, face buried in them
Yes — this is exactly 'I bury my face in my arms'
B
Lying flat on the back, arms folded on the chest, face uncovered
No — the face is not hidden
C
Lying flat with both arms thrown up behind the head
No — the arms are away from the face
D
Leaping in the air holding a pillow
No — wide awake and playing, not sleeping
Why it happens: The extract gives one physical action — burying the face in the arms — and only one picture shows it. The posture also matches the mood of the lines: turned inward, shutting out the room so that the dream can begin.
Q2.
I 1. (ii) What can be inferred about the speaker's feelings when night comes?
Answer
Night does not frighten him at all; it is the best part of his day. He feels calm, safe and quietly excited, because sleep is where his game continues.
Three things point to this. He turns towards sleep willingly — he 'buries' his face rather than lying awake. He carries the day's play into the night, since the very boats he floated in the morning 'float on and on' in the dream. And the beings he imagines in the dark are 'fairies of sleep' with 'baskets full of dreams' — gentle, gift-bringing figures, not monsters. There is a small thread of longing too, because the dream lets his boats travel further than any stream could take them.
Tip: For an inference question, do not repeat the line. Name the feeling in your first sentence, then prove it with two or three details.
Q3.
I 1. (iii) What kind of beings are the 'fairies of sleep' imagined as? Select the most appropriate option. A. mischievous B. gentle C. fearsome D. playful
Answer
B. gentle
Why it happens: The fairies do nothing sudden or noisy. They are 'sailing' — the softest verb in the poem — and what they carry is 'baskets full of dreams', a cargo that could hurt nobody. They neither tease the child (so not mischievous), nor threaten him (so not fearsome), nor romp about (so not playful); they simply glide along with his boats and keep his dreams safe.
Q4.
I 1. (iv) Fill in the blank by selecting the correct option from those given in the brackets. The phrase 'lading is their baskets full of dreams' suggests that the speaker imagines the fairies of sleep carefully _________________ (carrying his dreams / collecting his wishes) in their baskets.
Answer
…the speaker imagines the fairies of sleep carefully carrying his dreams in their baskets.
Why it happens: The word lading means the cargo a boat carries — the load it has already taken on board. The dreams are therefore not being gathered up; they are being ferried. Earlier in the poem the child 'loads' his own little boats with shiuli flowers, and this last image simply repeats that action in the dream-world: his boats now carry dreams instead of blossoms.
Q5.
II 1. Why do you think the poet writes his personal details on the paper boats?
Answer
Because the boat is meant to be a message about himself, not just a toy. He writes 'in big black letters… my name… and the name of the village where I live' so that whoever picks the boat up will be able to answer the question in the next line: 'I hope that someone in some strange land will find them and know who I am.'
Three things lie behind that wish. First, a child's simple faith that the world is friendly and that a stranger downstream will care. Second, loneliness turned into hope — he cannot travel, so he sends a piece of himself instead. Third, the longing to be remembered: name and village together make him findable, like an address on a letter.
Did you know? People have posted messages in bottles for centuries for exactly this reason. Some have been found seventy years and thousands of kilometres later.
Q6.
II 2. The poet talks about the imagination of a child. Support this view with examples from the poem.
Answer
Almost every line turns an ordinary thing into something larger. Four clear examples:
The boats become messengers. A folded sheet of paper is expected to reach 'some strange land' and introduce him to a stranger.
The clouds become boats. 'I look up into the sky and see the little clouds setting the white bulging sails' — the child reads the sky as a sea with ships on it.
The sky gets a playmate. 'I know not what playmate of mine in the sky sends them down the air to race with my boats!' He invents an unseen friend up there who is playing the same game.
Sleep gets a crew. The last line puts 'fairies of sleep' on board with 'baskets full of dreams', so even the night is peopled.
Why it happens: Notice the direction of the imagination — it always moves upward and outward: from the stream to the land beyond, from the water to the sky, from the day to the stars. That widening is what makes the poem feel like a child's mind rather than an adult's description of one.
Q7.
II 3. How does the poet bring together imagination and reality to make the poem more interesting?
Answer
Tagore keeps one foot in each world. Every stanza begins with something completely real and ends with something completely imagined, so the reader slides from fact into fancy without noticing the join.
The real thing
What imagination makes of it
Paper boats on a stream
Letters that will introduce him to a stranger in a far land
Shiuli flowers from the garden
'blooms of the dawn' entrusted to the night for a safe voyage
Little white clouds in the sky
'white bulging sails' set by an unseen playmate racing him
Falling asleep with his face in his arms
Fairies sailing his boats under the midnight stars with baskets of dreams
The technique works for two reasons. The real details are small, exact and homely — a garden, a village name, black letters — so we trust them; and once we trust them, we accept the fairies in the same breath. And because the imagined half always grows out of the real half, the poem never feels like nonsense. It feels like the way a child actually looks at the world.