NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 2 Gifts of Grace: Honouring Our Vocations (poem) — Critical Reflection

1. Option (ii) — to declare with confidence.

The shoemakers are ‘celebrating’ along with everyone else in the poem, so ‘affirming’ must be something positive and public: they stand by their work and say so without hesitation. Test the others against the extract. (i) ‘Make adjustments in’ would mean altering the shoes — the line is about finished quality, not repair. (iii) ‘Label the goods’ is a shop’s act, not a maker’s, and nothing in the poem mentions labels or brands. (iv) ‘Justify the efforts’ implies the work has been questioned and needs defending; the tone here is confident, not defensive. Only (ii) fits both the word and the mood.

2. According to the extract, quality shoes serve “the feet that walk, dance, run, jump, return home” — that is, they support every kind of movement in a person’s ordinary day, from plain walking to celebration, from hurry to play, and carry them safely back home at the end of it. Good shoes make the whole day’s motion possible and comfortable.

3. Literally, ‘return home’ is the end of a journey. In the poem it symbolises:

• Safety — coming back unhurt after the day’s work; the shoemaker’s craft protects someone’s feet all the way to the door.
• Rest and belonging — home as the place where labour stops and one is among one’s own people.
• Completion — the day’s round of walking, dancing, running and jumping is finished, and the cycle closes.

It also quietly measures the shoemaker’s worth: his work is judged not by what it looks like but by whether it brought somebody home.

4. The phrase is “each celebrating what belongs to them and to none else”. The words ‘and to none else’ are what make the contribution distinct — every worker owns a skill that is theirs alone and cannot be duplicated by anybody.

5. “…for the feet that walk, dance, run, jump, return home” refers to all the ordinary people who wear those shoes, and to the whole range of everyday activity their lives are made of — going to work, celebrating, hurrying, playing, and coming home again.

Because what the poet hears in the country is not one sound but many — and every one of them is the sound of somebody working with pride.

Unpack the three parts of the line:

• ‘I hear’ — the poet places himself as a listener, not a judge or a teacher. He is simply walking through Bharat with his ears open.
• ‘Bharat celebrating’ — the country is personified. A nation cannot celebrate; its people can. So ‘Bharat’ here means its working people, and the poet is saying that the true voice of the country comes from its workshops, kitchens, boats and building sites.
• ‘the varied vocations’ — the celebration is not a single festival but many separate ones happening at once: the lute in the street, the hum at the switchboard, the boatman’s song, the tap of a mason. ‘Varied’ is the poem’s key word; the whole catalogue that follows is its proof.

And ‘celebrating’ is chosen instead of ‘working’ for a reason. Work in this poem is not drudgery to be endured; it is an occasion for joy, because each worker is doing the one thing that is entirely their own.

It suggests that he goes to work happily — that the job is not a burden to him but something he takes pleasure in.

Humming is an involuntary sign of contentment. Nobody hums to order; you hum when you are at ease. And notice when he hums: not while resting afterwards, but as “they get ready for work”. The pleasure is in the anticipation of the day, which is the strongest possible evidence of job satisfaction.

Three further things the detail does:

• It gives the electrician his own sound, as the poem gives every trade — the lute, the singing boatmen, the cook. That prepares the closing claim that a vocation has a voice.
• There is a quiet pun. Electricity itself hums — in wires, transformers and switchboards. The worker’s hum and his trade’s hum are the same note, so the man and the work merge.
• It dignifies invisible labour. The electrician’s achievement is enormous — he works “with cables and wires to brighten our lives” — yet the poet catches him in the most ordinary moment, getting ready. Greatness, the line implies, is in the daily going-out to work.

The line is the poem’s conclusion and its argument: what a person does for a living is not something separate from who that person is — it is who they are.

The sentence is built as an equation, with ‘voice’ on both sides:

Three things it achieves.

• It gathers up every earlier line. The poem has spent nine lines giving each trade a sound — a lute, a hum, a boatman’s song, the tap of a mason’s rhythm. This line names what all those sounds actually were: people announcing who they are.
• It is personification, and the device carries the meaning. A vocation cannot speak; by giving it a voice, the poet makes the work a living presence beside the worker. The device is not decoration — it is the claim itself.
• It grants dignity without ranking. If work is identity, then no vocation can be ‘low’, because no identity is low. This is why the poem can place a designer and a mason in the same line, joined by ‘or’, with no difference in tone.

Yes — because a single ordinary morning depends on the work of dozens of people we never meet.

Trace one hour of it. The water that reaches the tap was laid on by a plumber and is pumped by a machine kept running by an electrician; the milk came by a dairy worker’s van; the bread was baked; the uniform was stitched by a tailor from cloth a weaver made; the bus is driven by a driver and repaired by a mechanic; the road under it was built by masons and labourers; the school building was raised by them too. Remove any one of these and the morning stops.

Two reasons that go beyond convenience:

• Interdependence, not hierarchy. A doctor cannot practise in a building nobody built, with instruments nobody manufactured, having eaten food nobody grew. Society is a web, and every strand carries load.
• Visibility is not the same as importance. The most essential work is often the least noticed — sanitation workers, farmers, electricians. The poem makes exactly this point by putting the electrician, whose job we notice only when the lights fail, in the same admiring line as the artist with the lute.

Because he believes that every vocation gives its worker an identity and gives society something it cannot do without — so all of them deserve the same respect, and none is beneath any other.

Three reasons the poem itself supplies:

• Every craft is a skill, and skill is worth honouring. The carpenter has “mathematical precision”; the shoemaker can “affirm the quality” of what he makes. These are achievements, not accidents.
• Every craft serves somebody. The electrician brightens our lives; the shoemaker serves “the feet that walk, dance, run, jump, return home”. Work is described here as care for other people.
• Every craft is somebody’s own. “each celebrating what belongs to them and to none else” — the poet celebrates vocations because they are the one possession that cannot be taken away.

Examples from your own context (replace these with people you actually know — that is what the question is asking for):

• The ASHA worker in our locality — the very vocation this chapter teaches on page 63 — who walks house to house before immunisation day. Nobody applauds her, and children in our lane are healthy because of her.
• The sanitation workers who clear our street at half past five each morning. One week of their absence would teach the whole neighbourhood how essential they are.
• The tailor at the corner who can look at a photograph and cut a kurta to fit. He has never advertised; every customer he has came from another customer.
• The farmer whose grain reaches our kitchen through a chain of hands — commission agent, lorry driver, shopkeeper — every one of them a vocation in the poem’s sense.

He describes work through the senses rather than through explanation — so instead of being told that labour is beautiful, we hear it, see it and even taste it.

Two things make this more than a list of images. First, the imagery is nearly all drawn from the work itself — the poet does not compare a carpenter to a sunrise; he finds the beauty in wood and precision. Second, the choice of the -ing form throughout (celebrating, humming, gathering, sailing, singing, affirming) keeps every worker in the middle of the action. Nothing is finished; everything is happening as we read. That is why the poem feels alive rather than like a description of a photograph.