NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 4 I Cannot Remember My Mother (poem) — Check Your Understanding

Book page 127–129 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.

I. Fill in the blanks with appropriate words. Stanza 1 1. The poet remembers his mother while he ____________. 2. The poet remembers the ____________ but not the ____________. Setting: ____________ (outdoor/indoor) Stanza 2 1. The poet remembers his mother in the ____________ season. 2. The poet remembers his mother by the smell of ____________. Setting: ____________ (outdoor/indoor) Stanza 3 1. The poet feels that his mother ____________ at him from the ____________. Setting: ____________ (outdoor/indoor)

Answer

Stanza	Blank	Answer	The line it comes from
1	1.	plays (is in the middle of his play / is playing with his playthings)	“only sometimes in the midst of my play”
	2.	tune (of the song she used to hum) … but not the mother (her face, herself)	“a tune seems to hover over my playthings, / the tune of some song that she used to / hum while rocking my cradle”
	Setting	indoor	He is among his playthings, and the memory attached to the place is of a cradle being rocked — both belong inside the house.
2	1.	early autumn	“but when in the early autumn morning”
	2.	the shiuli flowers (together with the scent of the morning service in the temple)	“the smell of the shiuli flowers floats in the air / the scent of the morning service in the temple / comes to me as the scent of my mother”
	Setting	outdoor	The scent “floats in the air” of an autumn morning and drifts from a temple — open air, outside the house.
3	1.	gazes (looks steadily) … from the sky	“I feel that the stillness of / my mother’s gaze on my face / has spread all over the sky”
3	Setting	indoor	“from my bedroom window I send / my eyes into the blue of the distant sky” — he is inside a room, looking out.

What the ‘Setting’ column is really testing: put the three answers in order — indoor → outdoor → indoor looking out — and notice what happens to the space of the poem. Stanza 1 is the smallest world there is: a cradle and a floor of toys. Stanza 2 opens the door and lets in a whole autumn morning and a temple down the road. Stanza 3 keeps the body indoors but sends the eyes “into the blue of the distant sky”, so the poem ends larger than it can physically be. The mother grows at exactly the same rate as the setting: a voice by a cradle, then a scent over a neighbourhood, then a gaze “spread all over the sky”. The fill-in-the-blanks is quietly asking you to notice the poem expanding.

Q2.

II. The senses of olfactory (smell), auditory (hearing), and visual (sight), are three of the five basic senses in humans. Give examples of references to senses from the poem. Complete the table given below. [Table on page 128 with columns: Stanza | Lines from the Poem | Senses. The middle row is filled in: ‘...the tune of some song that she used to hum while rocking my cradle’; the ‘Senses’ column of the last row reads ‘olfactory’.]

Answer

Stanza	Lines from the Poem	Senses
1	“a tune seems to hover over my playthings, / the tune of some song that she used to / hum while rocking my cradle” (the line printed as the example)	auditory
2	“the smell of the shiuli flowers floats in the air / the scent of the morning service in the temple / comes to me as the scent of my mother”	olfactory
3	“from my bedroom window I send / my eyes into the blue of the distant sky, / I feel that the stillness of / my mother’s gaze on my face / has spread all over the sky”	visual

A note on the printed table: the example line — “the tune of some song that she used to hum while rocking my cradle” — is printed in the row numbered 3, but that line belongs to Stanza 1 of the poem, and the row whose sense is already given as “olfactory” must be Stanza 2. Fill the table by matching the lines and the sense, as above, and note the discrepancy in the row numbers when you show it to your teacher.

Two extra observations worth adding under the table:

Stanza 3 is not purely visual — “the stillness of my mother’s gaze” brings in silence, and “I feel” brings in touch. The senses begin to blur as the poem widens.
Stanza 1 also carries a kinaesthetic image — the rocking of the cradle — which is why the stanza has a swaying movement when read aloud.

Why one sense per stanza: Tagore is describing a mother he cannot picture, so he cannot use the ordinary method of description. Instead he gives each stanza a single sense and lets it do all the work. The order matters too. Hearing and smell are the senses that survive earliest infancy and reach us without being asked for; sight is the one that fails him — he cannot see her face. So the poem saves sight for last and then uses it on the sky rather than on her. He looks in the only direction where she can still be found.

Q3.

III. Read the poem silently once again and complete the following. 1. Two examples of alliteration from the poem are (i) __________ and (ii) ___________. 2. An example of onomatopoeia is ________________. 3. The poem uses imagery extensively. Explain. 4. Although the poem does not have a rhyme scheme, it is enjoyable because ______________. 5. What is the tone of the poet? Why do you say so? 6. What impact does the title of the poem have on the overall mood of the poem? 7. The poet uses ‘I cannot remember my mother’ as a refrain because __________________. 8. The poet uses symbolism to indicate the memory of his mother’s presence. Identify the symbols used in the poem. [Boxes on page 129: Symbolism is a literary device in which a writer uses a tangible object, abstract idea, or phenomenon that represents something beyond the literal meaning. It helps the poet convey deeper meanings and to connect with readers on an emotional level. Refrain is a poetic device defined as a line or a group of lines that is repeated at regular intervals in a poem.]

Answer

1. Alliteration — the repetition of the same consonant sound at the start of nearby words.

(i) “my mother” — the repeated /m/, which returns at the head of every stanza. It is also the softest, most closed-mouth consonant in English, and the sound a hum is made of.
(ii) “the smell of the shiuli flowers floats in the air” — the repeated /f/ makes the line itself drift.

Also acceptable: “some song … she used to” (/s/), and “hover … hum” (/h/).

2. Onomatopoeia — a word that imitates the sound it names: hum. Saying it aloud produces the low continuous sound it describes, so the word does the mother’s singing rather than reporting it.

3. Imagery. The poem has almost no statement in it — it is built out of images, one for each sense, and they widen as the poem goes on.

Image	Sense	What it does
“a tune seems to hover over my playthings”	auditory	The verb hover holds the tune in the air — neither settling nor going away. That is precisely the condition of a half-memory.
“hum while rocking my cradle”	auditory + kinaesthetic	Sound plus movement; the reader feels the sway as well as hears the song.
“the smell of the shiuli flowers floats in the air”	olfactory	A scent cannot be summoned or refused. It arrives — which is exactly how this memory behaves.
“the scent of the morning service in the temple”	olfactory	Incense and flowers, so the mother’s memory takes on the atmosphere of worship.
“I send / my eyes into the blue of the distant sky”	visual	“Send my eyes” makes looking an act of travel; the boy reaches out from a window he cannot leave.
“the stillness of / my mother’s gaze … has spread all over the sky”	visual + tactile	An expression on a face is stretched to the size of the horizon.

Taken together the images move from small and enclosed (playthings, cradle) to open air (autumn morning, temple) to infinite (the whole sky). That widening is the poem’s meaning: the less he can picture her, the larger she becomes.

4. Although the poem does not have a rhyme scheme, it is enjoyable because its music comes from other sources — the refrain that opens each stanza like a returning note, the soft repeated /m/, /s/ and /h/ sounds, the long vowels in “hover”, “floats” and “blue” that slow the lines down, and the run-on lines (enjambment) that let each sentence drift across the line break the way a memory drifts into the mind. The absence of rhyme also keeps the voice close to ordinary speech, so the feeling sounds confided rather than composed.

5. Tone. The tone is tender, wistful and serene — affectionate and quietly accepting rather than grieving. The evidence is in the choice of words:

The qualifiers are gentle and modest — “only sometimes”, “seems to hover”, “I feel that”. He never insists.
There is no exclamation mark, no protest, no “why”. A poem of grief would complain; this one simply notices.
The key nouns are calm ones — stillness, scent, tune, blue.
Every stanza ends in comfort rather than in loss: a lullaby, a scent “of my mother”, a gaze covering the sky.

6. Impact of the title on the mood. The title is a statement of loss, and it is the first thing the reader meets, so the poem begins in a mood of absence. But every stanza then contradicts it — he says he cannot remember, and then remembers. The mood that results is therefore bittersweet rather than sad: each recovered detail feels like something rescued, and the reader is made to hold the loss and the recovery at the same time. Had the poem been called “Memories of My Mother”, the same images would have felt merely pleasant. The negative title is what gives them their weight.

7. The poet uses ‘I cannot remember my mother’ as a refrain because it holds the poem together and measures what memory can do without a face. Repeating it at the head of each stanza makes it a fixed point that the three sensory memories can grow out of; the repetition gives the free verse the rhythm of a returning thought, echoing the very rocking and humming the poem describes; and, most importantly, it is disproved every time it is spoken — three lines after each “I cannot remember”, something of her arrives. The refrain therefore turns from a confession of loss into a measure of what survives.

8. Symbolism. Every concrete object in the poem stands for something larger:

Symbol	What it stands for
the hummed tune	the mother’s voice and the care it carried — love that survives as sound after the face is gone
the cradle	infancy itself, and her constant nurturing presence in the years he cannot recall
the shiuli flowers	purity, and the autumn festival season of a Bengali childhood; a flower that falls before dawn, so it stands for something given and lost every night
the scent of the morning service	the sacredness of the mother — she is placed on a level with worship
the blue of the distant sky	her infinite, encompassing presence — vast, constant, above him wherever he goes
the stillness of her gaze	calm, watchful, protective love that asks nothing and does not go away

How the symbols are chosen: not one of them can be held. A tune, a scent, a sky, a look — all of them reach the boy without being touched and without being kept. Tagore could have chosen a photograph, a sari, a piece of jewellery. He chose only things that arrive on their own, because that is how this mother comes back.

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