NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 5 & 224Magnifying Glass — Let us discuss
Book page 223 Updated on2026-09-05
Q1.
Complete the summary of the poem given below with suitable words from the poem. The poem describes the magic of seeing the world through a 1. __________. It reveals how tiny things like 2. __________ and 3. __________ can appear vast and complex. Even a 4. __________ of water can seem like a hive of 5. __________. The poet is impressed at how the spider spins its 6. __________ from its 7. __________. The poem ends with the idea that, through lenses, the 8. __________ could seem within reach.
Answer
Blank
Word
Line in the poem
1.
glass (‘round glass')
“With this round glass / I can make Magic talk—”
2.
shells
“A myriad shells show / In a scrap of chalk;”
3.
moss
“Of but an inch of moss / A forest—flowers and trees;”
4.
drop
“A drop of water / Like hive of bees.”
5.
bees
“Like hive of bees.”
6.
web-silk
“The woven web-silk / From his spinnerets;”
7.
spinnerets
“From his spinnerets;”
8.
moon
“Eyeing the moon, / 'Twould seem you'd walk there / In an afternoon!”
Note on 2 and 3: they may be written in either order — the poem gives shells first, then moss. Blank 6 may be answered ‘web-silk' or simply ‘web'; ‘web-silk' is the poem's own word.
Q2.
Fill in the blanks by choosing the correct answer from the brackets. 1. The main idea of the poem is the transformative power of __________ (wonders in nature/close observation) through the magnifying glass.
Answer
The main idea of the poem is the transformative power of close observation through the magnifying glass.
Why not ‘wonders in nature': the wonders were in the chalk, the moss and the spider all along — nothing about them changes. What changes is the looking. The poem's grammar says so: every sentence has an active watcher in it — “I can make”, “I lie in wait and watch”. The lens does not create marvels; it lets a patient eye find them.
Q3.
2. The tone of the poem is __________. (wonder and curiosity/peaceful and emotional)
Answer
The tone of the poem is wonder and curiosity.
The evidence is in the punctuation and the verbs: three exclamation marks (“The tigerish claws he has!”, “With all those eyes!”, “In an afternoon!”), the interjection “And oh!”, the eager “Yes, and…” that opens the last stanza, and watching verbs — show, lie in wait, watch, eyeing. A peaceful poem would be still and slow; this one keeps catching its breath.
Q4.
3. The poem has __________ stanzas with __________ lines in each stanza. Hence, it is a quatrain. (four; six/six; four)
Answer
The poem has six stanzas with four lines in each stanza. Hence, it is a quatrain.
Count them: (1) “With this round glass… In a scrap of chalk;” (2) “Of but an inch of moss… Like hive of bees.” (3) “I lie in wait and watch… From his spinnerets;” (4) “The tigerish claws he has!… With all those eyes!” (5) “Not even the tiniest thing… And itself surpass.” (6) “Yes, and with lenses like it… In an afternoon!” — six groups, four lines each.
Term: a quatrain is a four-line stanza. It is the commonest stanza in English poetry, and it suits this poem because each quatrain can hold one complete small discovery.
Q5.
4. The rhyme scheme of the poem is __________. (ABCD; ABCB)
Answer
The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABCB.
Stanza 1
End word
Rhyme label
With this round glass
glass
A
I can make Magic talk—
talk
B
A myriad shells show
show
C
In a scrap of chalk;
chalk
B
The pattern repeats: trees / bees in stanza 2, jets / spinnerets in stanza 3, flies / eyes in stanza 4, glass / surpass in stanza 5, moon / afternoon in stanza 6 — always lines 2 and 4.
What the scheme does: only one rhyme falls per stanza, and it falls at the end. So each quatrain feels like a small door clicking shut — a discovery made, then the next one begun. A tighter scheme like AABB would sound like a jingle; ABCB keeps the poem conversational while still giving each stanza a snap at the close.
Q6.
Pick examples from the poem for the following poetic devices. 1. Simile
Answer
“A drop of water / Like hive of bees.”
A single drop of water is compared to a beehive using the word like. Also, in the last stanza: “with lenses like it”.
Why this comparison is so exact: put a drop of pond water under a lens and it is not empty — it is crowded with tiny creatures moving in every direction. That is precisely the impression a hive gives: a small enclosed space swarming with restless life. The simile carries movement and number at once, not just appearance.
Q7.
2. Alliteration
Answer
“The woven web-silk” — the w sound repeated in woven and web.
Other clear examples:
“A myriad shells show / In a scrap of chalk” — the hissing s of shells, show, scrap;
“And oh! the silly flies / The stumble into his net”;
“I can make Magic” — make, Magic;
“A forest—flowers and trees”.
What it achieves here: ‘woven web-silk' makes your mouth repeat the same movement three times in three syllables — the sound imitates the spider's repeated action of laying thread after thread. Alliteration in this poem is not decoration; it slows the line down so the eye can stay on the small thing being described.
Q8.
3. Metaphor
Answer
“Of but an inch of moss / A forest—flowers and trees” — the moss is not said to be like a forest; through the lens it simply is a forest, with its own flowers and trees.
A second one opens the poem: “I can make Magic talk” — the glass's revelations are called Magic, and Magic is given a voice.
Simile or metaphor — how to tell: a simile keeps the two things separate and joins them with like or as (“a drop of water like hive of bees”). A metaphor drops the joining word and lets one thing be spoken of as the other (“an inch of moss — a forest”). That is why the metaphor feels stronger: it does not compare the moss to a forest, it insists that this is what you are looking at.
Q9.
The poem is rich in visual imagery, painting vivid pictures of small, everyday things magnified into something grand. 1. In the line, ‘A myriad shells show in a scrap of chalk’, the magnifying glass reveals ______________________.
Answer
…the magnifying glass reveals that a plain white scrap of chalk is not plain at all — it is packed with countless tiny shells, so that a piece of classroom chalk turns out to be made of the remains of sea creatures.
The poet is being literally accurate. Natural chalk is a soft white limestone formed on ancient sea floors from the shells of microscopic organisms called coccolithophores. So ‘a myriad shells' is not a fancy; it is what is actually there. The word myriad (countless) set against a scrap (the smallest possible piece) is the whole poem in four words: the smallest thing holds the largest number.
Q10.
2. In the line, ‘A forest—flowers and trees’ the poet uses the imagery of nature to emphasise ______________________.
Answer
…the poet uses the imagery of nature to emphasise that size is only a matter of where you stand — an inch of moss contains stems, blossoms and canopies of its own, so it is a complete forest to anything small enough to live in it.
How the line is built: the dash after ‘forest' works like the lens itself. First you are given the whole — “A forest” — and then, as the focus sharpens, the parts arrive: “flowers and trees”. The reader's eye zooms in exactly as the speaker's does. This is imagery doing structural work, not just providing a picture.
Q11.
Complete the following sentences with a reason. 1. The poet uses exclamation marks in lines, ‘The tigerish claws he has!’, ‘With all those eyes!’ and ‘In an afternoon!’ because it ______________________.
Answer
…because it lets us hear the speaker's astonishment at the moment it strikes him, instead of telling us about it afterwards. Each mark comes at the end of a discovery he did not expect: that a spider is armed like a tiger, that a fly is covered in eyes, that the moon could be a walk away.
What is gained: without them the same lines would be flat statements of fact. The exclamation converts the poem from a description into a live reaction, so the reader is standing beside the lens rather than reading a report. It also breaks the calm of the quatrains three times, at exactly the three points where the poem is most surprised by itself.
Q12.
2. In the phrase, ‘Magic talk’ the poet uses personification to describe the magnifying glass because it ______________________.
Answer
…because it treats the magic worked by the glass as a living being with a voice — the lens does not merely show the speaker things, it tells him the secrets that ordinary objects have been keeping.
Why the choice of ‘talk' matters: the poet could have written ‘I can see magic'. ‘Talk' makes the exchange two-way — the world answers back when you look at it properly. It also makes the capital ‘M' meaningful: Magic becomes a character in the poem, summoned by the glass. And ‘talk' is a plain, everyday word, which keeps the wonder domestic rather than solemn.
Q13.
3. Each stanza follows a repetitive pattern of introducing a small or ordinary object and then describing the extraordinary details revealed through magnification. This is because it supports the theme of __________ as the speaker reveals ____________.
Answer
This is because it supports the theme of the transforming power of close observation — the idea that wonder is hidden inside ordinary things as the speaker reveals the extraordinary detail packed into a scrap of chalk, an inch of moss, a drop of water, a spider's spinnerets and a fly's eyes.
How the repetition itself argues the case: the pattern is small thing → vast thing, five times over, and only then, in the sixth stanza, does it reverse to vast thing → within reach. Because the reader has been trained by five stanzas to expect the small to open out, the final leap to the moon feels earned rather than fanciful. Form and meaning are doing the same work.
Q14.
4. In the final stanza the poet shifts from small, everyday objects being magnified to a celestial body like moon because __________.
Answer
…because he wants to show that there is no limit to what patient looking can bring close. The same curved piece of glass that turns a scrap of chalk into a shore of shells becomes, in a telescope, the thing that brings the moon near enough to seem a walk away — “'Twould seem you'd walk there / In an afternoon!”
Three things the shift does:
It completes the argument. Stanzas 1–5 make the tiny large; stanza 6 makes the distant near. Together they say the lens defeats both kinds of distance.
It moves from observing to imagining. Everything before this is true — chalk really does hold shells. Walking to the moon in an afternoon is not true, and the poet knows it: he writes “'Twould seem”. Curiosity has crossed from what the lens shows into what the mind now dares to want.
It ends the poem outward. A poem that closed on the spider would be a poem about small things. Closing on the moon makes it a poem about human reach.
Did you know? Walter de la Mare died in 1956 — thirteen years before Apollo 11. The walk he calls an impossible seeming had been made by the time most readers of this poem were born.