NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 2 (Check Your Understanding, item II)Gifts of Grace: Honouring Our Vocations (poem) — Let us appreciate the poem

(i) It is in free verse. There is no rhyme scheme at all.

Set the line-endings side by side and the absence of pattern is plain: hear – hues – streets – precision – lives – sea – home – else – hear. Nothing rhymes with anything. Nor is there a regular metre; the lines simply run to the length the sense needs, and the poem is not divided into stanzas. What holds it together instead is repetition — of a sentence pattern, of the word ‘celebrating’, and of the first line at the end.

(ii) The uneven line lengths make the poem sound like a real, unrehearsed catalogue of voices rather than a composed song — and they let the poet give each vocation exactly as much room as it needs.

Compare two lines:

Three effects follow. The variation stops any sing-song rhythm from forming, so the poem keeps the movement of ordinary speech. It suggests variety itself — the poem’s whole subject is that vocations are ‘varied’, and lines of different lengths enact that. And it makes the short opening and closing line stand out sharply from the long body of the poem, framing it.

(iii) Most lines follow one repeated structure:

“The carpenters celebrating; they create anything out of wood…”, “The electricians humming; they get ready for work…”, “The boatmen gathering their nets…”, “The shoemakers affirming the quality of their work…”. This is parallelism, with the repeated ‘The’ at the start of successive lines making it anaphora as well.

The speaker is an unnamed observer — a listener walking through Bharat — who never tells us a single fact about himself or herself except the act of listening: “I hear Bharat celebrating… the varied voices I hear!”

Notice what the speaker is not. He or she is not a worker; no trade is claimed in the first person. There is no name, no age, no place. The only pronoun the speaker uses about others is ‘their’ — “their craft”, “their work”, “their vocation”, “their identity”. The speaker stands outside the crafts and points at them.

The role is that of a witness and a celebrant, and it has three parts:

• To gather. The speaker collects nine or ten different trades into one poem, which no single worker could do — a carpenter hears his own workshop, not the boats and the kitchens.
• To honour. By reporting each trade in the same admiring frame, the speaker confers equal dignity on all of them. The title calls them ‘gifts of grace’.
• To speak for the country. ‘Bharat’ is doing the celebrating; the speaker is the ear through which we hear it. The individual ‘I’ almost disappears into that larger act of listening.

A. The tone is celebratory and reverential.
B. There is a joyful mood throughout the poem.

(i) Two visual images:

• “each one celebrating their craft, woven with colours and myriad hues” — the eye is filled with a spread of countless shades; ‘woven’ makes the colours a fabric, so we see a weaver’s cloth and the whole crafts tradition at once.
• “The boatmen gathering their nets from the shore, sailing” — a complete picture: figures on a beach, wet nets being drawn in, boats moving out to sea.

Equally acceptable: “they create anything out of wood with mathematical precision”; “work with cables and wires to brighten our lives”; “for the feet that walk, dance, run, jump, return home”.

(ii) The poem includes auditory imagery through mentions of artisans with lutes, the electricians humming, and the delicious singing of the cook, emphasising the sounds associated with each vocation.

The boatmen “singing while at work” and the dreams “echoing in the streets” are equally correct fillers — the poem is unusually rich in sound.

True.

‘Delicious’ is a word of taste. ‘Singing’ is a thing of sound. By joining them, the poet says that the cook’s singing is delicious — not that it is like something delicious. There is no ‘like’ or ‘as’, so the comparison is implied rather than stated, and that is exactly what makes it a metaphor and not a simile.

Why the choice of word is so apt here. The poet could have written ‘sweet singing’ or ‘cheerful singing’. ‘Delicious’ is chosen because it belongs to the cook’s own trade — the one adjective a cook earns. So the metaphor does two things at once: it praises the singing, and it tells you whose singing it is. The pleasure of the song and the pleasure of the food become a single sensation.

The line is: “The voice of their vocation is the voice of their identity.”

A vocation is an abstract thing — an occupation, a kind of work. It cannot literally speak. By giving it a voice, the poet treats the vocation as a living person standing beside the worker and speaking for them. That transfer of a human attribute to something non-human is personification.

What the personification achieves:

• It makes the work a character in its own right, not merely something a person does between morning and evening.
• It sets up an equation — voice of vocation = voice of identity — so that speaking as a carpenter and being a carpenter become the same act. What you do is who you are.
• It gathers the whole poem together. Every earlier line has given a trade a sound: humming, singing, the echo in the streets. This line names what all those sounds were: the vocations themselves, speaking.

First, look closely: the two lines are almost the same, and the one difference is the point of the whole device.

Four reasons for the repetition:

• It frames the poem. Everything between the two lines is what the speaker heard — the carpenters, the boatmen, the cook. The repeated line is like opening a door, listening, and closing it again.
• It works as a refrain. Since the poem has no rhyme and no stanzas, this returning line is what gives it the feel of a song and holds the loose catalogue together.
• It suggests that the celebration never stops. Ending where it began makes the poem circular; you could read it round again. The work of Bharat goes on beyond the last line.
• The changed word records what the poem has done. ‘Vocations’ are jobs; ‘voices’ are people speaking. Over nine lines each trade has been given a sound of its own, so by the end the speaker no longer hears occupations — he hears individuals. And the full stop has become an exclamation mark: listening has turned into celebration.

Two more you may use instead:

• “work with cables and wires” — three w sounds in five words, a hum that matches the electrician’s own humming.
• “The voice of their vocation is the voice of their identity” — the repeated v binds ‘voice’ and ‘vocation’ by sound before the sentence links them by meaning. (Notice too that the two words share a Latin root, vocare, ‘to call’.)

Each vocation stands for a human identity — for dignity, self-worth and belonging — and, taken together, they stand for the working life of Bharat itself.

The poem states this outright in its last full line: “The voice of their vocation is the voice of their identity.” Work is not what these people do for money; it is what they are. Read that way, each trade in the catalogue carries a larger meaning:

Two further meanings run under the whole list. The title calls these skills “Gifts of Grace” — that is, blessings received rather than merely acquired, which is exactly how Sentila describes her own gift in the story: “it simply came to me”. And because the speaker hears all of them together as ‘Bharat celebrating’, the vocations become a symbol of the nation as its people’s labour — a country understood through its workers rather than its rulers or its monuments.