My mother at Sixty Six - Part 2

Day 5

8th April, 2020

My mother at Sixty Six

Good Morning Gentlemen

The poem we read yesterday must have got you closer to your parents and grandparents. The love they show and affection showered is irreplaceable. Nothing compared to the love you get from them.  Unconditional, unbiased, pure and pious. How beautiful! Isn't  it?

Let us keep this love intact in our hearts for them and treat them the way they truly deserve.

Today we are going to move ahead and do short questions for this beautiful poem. But before we move ahead, let us recall our learning objectives for this poem.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this poem, you will be able to:-

• Paraphrase the poem.
• Identify the poetic devices.
• Explain the theme of the poem.
• Relate the poet's experience with your own.

Life Lesson

• Appreciating the presence of parents in our lives.
• Being aware that they are aging with every passing day and they deserve all our love and affection.

Now that the poem is clear to you, let us get working with the short questions.

Kindly note that there will be no long questions for this poem. The content will be divided into two days. In this blog, you will be given 5 short questions and 2 RTCs and tomorrow's blog will have another set of 5 short questions and 2 more RTCs.  


All these questions are to be done in your notebooks. 

Short answer type questions. 


Q.1 Why does the poet smile and what does she say while bidding goodbye to her mother?

Q.2 What is the kind of pain and ache that the poet feels?


Q.3 Why are the young trees described as sprinting?

Q.4 Why has the poet bought in the image of the merry children ‘spilling out of their homes’?

Q.5 Why has the mother been compared to ‘late winter’s moon’?


Q.6 What do the parting words of the poet and her smile signify? 

Reference to context

Read the given context and answer the questions. 

1. Driving from my parent’s home to Cochin last Friday

morning, I saw my mother,

beside me,

doze, open mouthed, her face

ashen like that

of a corpse and realized with pain

that she was as old as she looked and

thought away…

a) Where was the poet driving to? Who was sitting beside her?

b) What did the poet notice about her mother?

c) Why did her mother’s face look like that of a corpse?

2. but soon

put that thought away, and

looked out at young

trees sprinting, the merry children spilling

out of their homes

a) What did the poet realize? How did she feel?

b) What did she do then?

c) What did she see outside?

See you tomorrow with another set of questions. 

Till then

Stay Safe

Stay Inside

God Bless You All