NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 3 Canvas of Soil (poem) — Learning Beyond the Text

The structure is deliberate: 1 or 2 is the research half, 3 or 4 is the doing half. Pick one from each so that what you find out feeds directly into what you make.

Assignment (1) — five famous gardens of India. Choose gardens of five different kinds, so your report has something to compare:

Organise the report under the three headings the book names — history, design elements, cultural significance — and end with a comparison table so the reader can see at a glance which gardens are formal and which are natural, which are for display and which for study.

Assignment (2) — art inspired by gardens. Good choices with an Indian connection: Mughal miniature paintings of the charbagh; the garden scenes of Kangra and Basohli painting; Amrita Sher-Gil’s use of colour; the garden and grove backgrounds of Madhubani painting; Warli murals of the field and the tree; or the tree-of-life motif in kalamkari. Analyse how the garden is represented — is it seen from above as a plan, or from within? Is it wild or ordered? Are people in it? Then make your response — a painting, a collage from waste paper, a photo-essay, or a poem in the manner of ‘Canvas of Soil’.

Assignment (3) — design your own garden. Draw it to scale on graph paper. Mark north, so you know where the sun falls. Show the entrance, the paths, the beds, one seating spot, one tree for shade, the water source and a compost corner. Choose plants that suit your city’s rainfall. Then write a half-page note explaining every choice and naming which of the five gardens each idea came from.

Assignment (4) — interview a gardener.

Sample answer: ten questions for the interview

1. How long have you worked as a gardener, and who taught you?
2. Which month is the busiest in your year, and what do you do in it?
3. How do you decide which plant goes where in a bed?
4. Where do you get your soil, manure and seeds from?
5. How do you make compost, and how long does it take?
6. Which plants survive best here with the least water?
7. What pest troubles you most, and how do you deal with it without harming the birds?
8. What is the commonest mistake people make with plants at home?
9. Has your work changed in the last ten years — the weather, the water, what people ask for?
10. Which plant in this garden are you proudest of, and why?

No question is set — the book says “read and enjoy”. But read it beside ‘Canvas of Soil’, because the two poems are doing the same thing a century apart, and the comparison is the real reward.

What the poem says. A wall of leaves — “A sea of foliage” — surrounds the poet’s garden. But it is “not a sea of dull unvaried green”: light-green tamarinds stand among mangoes of “green profound”, grey palms rise “like pillars” between them, and red seemul (silk-cotton) trees lean over the pools, “Red-red, and startling like a trumpet’s sound.” Then comes the turn: nothing is lovelier than the bamboos to the east when the moon shines through their gaps and the white lotus “changes / Into a cup of silver.” One could “swoon / Drunken with beauty”, or simply gaze “On a primeval Eden, in amaze.”

How Toru Dutt gets her effects.

• Metaphor at the very start. The garden is not merely leafy; it is a sea, and the foliage “girds” it — a word that means to encircle as a belt does. Two words and the garden is both drowned in green and held tight.
• Correction as a technique. Line 2 immediately contradicts line 1 — “But not a sea of dull unvaried green”. The poet raises the expectation of monotony only to break it, which makes the colours that follow land harder.
• Shades, not colours. Exactly like Maya Anthony, she refuses the word green on its own: light-green tamarind, mango of green profound, palms of gray. This is the ‘shades of green’ exercise on page 92 practised by a poet.
• Synaesthesia — the boldest stroke in the poem. “Red-red, and startling like a trumpet’s sound” describes a colour by means of a sound. It is a simile that crosses the senses, and it makes the red seem sudden and loud rather than merely bright.
• A simile for shape. Palms “arise, like pillars gray” turns a row of trees into architecture, giving the garden the calm order of a temple hall.
• Transformation by light. The white lotus “changes / Into a cup of silver” under the moon — an ordinary flower is turned into a made object, which is precisely what ‘Canvas of Soil’ does when a garden becomes a painting.
• Enjambment. “the white lotus changes / Into a cup of silver” and “One might swoon / Drunken with beauty” run over the line-ending, so the sentence spills forward the way the poet’s wonder does.
• Form. It is a sonnet of fourteen lines with an octave (eight lines describing the garden by day) and a sestet (six lines of moonlight and awe), turning at “But nothing can be lovelier…”.