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NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 5 & 225Magnifying Glass — Let us think and reflect

Book page 224 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
Read the given extract and answer the questions that follow. “With this round glass / I can make Magic talk— / A myriad shells show / In a scrap of chalk; / Of but an inch of moss / A forest—flowers and trees;” (i) Identify whether the following statement is true or false. The poet uses his magical powers to make the round glass powerful.
Answer

False.

The poet claims no powers at all. The power is in the instrument and in the act of looking: “With this round glass / I can make Magic talk”. Remove the glass and he can make nothing talk. The word ‘Magic' is his name for what the lens uncovers in ordinary things — it is not something he possesses.

Read the preposition: the whole meaning of the poem turns on ‘With this round glass'. A magician would say ‘By my art'. The speaker is an observer with a tool, and the marvels he reports — shells in chalk, a forest in moss — were there before he arrived.
Q2.
(ii) Select the line from the extract that expresses the presence of intricate patterns in ordinary objects.
Answer

“A myriad shells show / In a scrap of chalk;”

‘Chalk' is as ordinary as an object can be, and ‘a scrap' is the least of it — yet the lens finds myriad (countless) shells inside, each one a shaped, patterned thing.

Also defensible: “Of but an inch of moss / A forest—flowers and trees” shows the same idea. But the shells-in-chalk line is the better answer because shells are literally patterns, while the forest is a matter of scale.
Q3.
(iii) What does the comparison of ‘an inch of moss’ to a ‘forest’ suggest about the speaker’s view of the world through the magnifying glass?
Answer

It suggests that he sees the world as containing whole worlds inside itself — that nothing is too small to be complete, and that ‘big' and ‘small' are judgements made by an eye, not properties of things.

An inch of moss looks to us like green fuzz. Under the lens it has stems standing like trunks, spore-cases held up like flowers, shade and depth between them — everything a forest has, at a scale we normally step over. The speaker's view, then, is that the ordinary world is not thin; it is deep, and our eyes have simply been skating across the top of it.

Notice the tiny word ‘but': “Of but an inch of moss” means ‘of no more than an inch'. It is placed there to make the smallness insistent, so that the word ‘forest' in the next line lands with maximum force. One three-letter word does the work of a whole sentence.
Q4.
(iv) How does the poet feel about the ability of the magnifying glass to reveal hidden wonders? A. Satisfied B. Fascinated C. Grateful D. Determined
Answer

B. Fascinated

Why: he is not calmly pleased (satisfied), not thanking anyone (grateful), and not pursuing a goal (determined). He is held — he keeps looking, keeps finding more, and breaks into exclamations when he does. ‘Magic', the piling up of one discovery on another, and the leap to the moon at the end are all signs of fascination, which is wonder that will not let go.
Exam tip: in a tone question, test each option against the poem's verbs and punctuation, not its subject. Here, ‘I lie in wait and watch' shows sustained absorption; ‘Satisfied' would have produced a poem that stopped after one stanza.
Q5.
Answer the following questions. 1. What is the significance of the spider in the poem?
Answer

The spider is the poem's centrepiece, and it changes what the poem is about.

Up to that point the discoveries are still: shells sitting in chalk, moss standing like a forest, a drop of water. With the spider the lens catches something at work — “How the deft spider jets / The woven web-silk / From his spinnerets”. The speaker sees not just a creature but a process, and even names the organ, spinnerets, which is a real anatomical term. He also has to be patient for it: “I lie in wait and watch.”

Then, in the very next stanza, the mood turns: “The tigerish claws he has! / And oh! the silly flies / The stumble into his net— / With all those eyes!” The lens has shown him beauty and craft, and in the same instant a hunter and its prey.

Why that matters: the spider stops the poem from being merely pretty. Close observation, the poem admits, does not only reveal wonders — it reveals what nature actually is: skilful, armed and indifferent. The word tigerish puts a jungle predator inside a creature the size of a fingernail, and the flies' many eyes make their blundering worse, not better. It is the one place where the poem's delight has an edge to it.
Q6.
2. How might the speaker’s view of the natural world change if there was no use of a magnifying glass?
Answer

It would shrink to the surface of things. Without the lens:

  • chalk would be a white stick for writing, not the resting place of countless shells;
  • moss would be a green stain on a wall, not a forest with flowers and trees;
  • a drop of water would be wetness, not a hive;
  • the spider would be a small dark shape, and its silk merely a thread — the jetting spinnerets, the deftness and the tigerish claws would all be invisible;
  • and the last stanza could not exist at all, because the leap to the moon is built on trust in what lenses can do.

He would still find nature pleasant. What he would lose is the knowledge that it is intricate — and with it the particular emotion this poem is made of, which is not admiration but astonishment.

The deeper claim: the poem suggests that our sense of how rich the world is depends on the instruments we use to look at it. Every new lens in history — microscope, telescope, X-ray, electron microscope — has enlarged not just our sight but our idea of what exists.
Q7.
3. Why does the poem end with the idea of the moon being within reach?
Answer

Because it is the largest possible proof of the poem's one idea: looking closely abolishes distance.

Five stanzas have made small things vast. The sixth reverses the direction and makes a vast, unreachable thing feel near — “with lenses like it, / Eyeing the moon, / 'Twould seem you'd walk there / In an afternoon!” The same optical principle serves both journeys, so the ending is not a change of subject but the argument's final step.

Three further reasons the ending works:
  • It ends on exhilaration. “Yes, and…” opens the stanza like someone who has just thought of something better, and the exclamation mark closes the poem on that rise.
  • It admits it is imagining. “'Twould seem” is careful and honest. The lens brings the moon close to the eye; the walk is what the mind then wants. Curiosity is being shown turning into ambition.
  • It sets no limit. Ending with the spider would have closed the poem inside the garden. The moon leaves the door open — and history has since walked through it.
Q8.
4. What is the speaker’s attitude towards nature and the act of observation?
Answer

His attitude is one of active, patient, unsentimental wonder.

  • Active, not passive. He does not wait to be shown things — “I lie in wait and watch”, “Eyeing the moon”. Observation, for him, is something you do, and it takes time.
  • Reverent about small things. “Not even the tiniest thing / But this my glass / Will make more marvellous / And itself surpass” — a double negative meaning there is nothing so small that the glass cannot make it marvellous. Nothing in nature is beneath attention.
  • Honest about what he finds. He records the tigerish claws and the doomed flies as readily as the flowers. He does not tidy nature into prettiness.
  • Never finished. Each stanza turns to something new, and the last turns to the sky. Curiosity, in this poem, has no natural stopping place.
The line to quote if you quote only one: “Not even the tiniest thing / But this my glass / Will make more marvellous / And itself surpass.” It says that the object seen through the lens outdoes even itself — the marvel was inside the thing, waiting for an eye good enough to find it.
Q9.
5. Which is your favourite part of the poem? Why?
Answer

Choose a specific line or stanza — not ‘the whole poem' — and give a reason that comes from the words themselves.

Sample answer: My favourite part is “A drop of water / Like hive of bees.” I like it because it is the shortest comparison in the poem and it does the most work. A hive is not just crowded; it is busy, full of movement you cannot follow. So in four words the poet tells me that a drop of water is not still and clear at all but alive and swarming. Last year we looked at pond water under the school microscope, and that is exactly what it was like — I could not count anything because nothing stayed still. The line described something I had already seen but had no words for.
What makes a good answer here: a quoted line, a statement of what the line does, and a personal reason that is genuinely connected to it. Avoid ‘I liked it because it is beautiful' — that could be said of any line and therefore says nothing about this one.
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