NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 4 I Cannot Remember My Mother (poem) — Critical Reflection

(i) The poet is reminded of his mother during his play / playtime — the extract says “only sometimes in the midst of my play”, and the tune settles “over my playthings”.

(ii) C. It activates memories of the mother. Work it out from the extract alone. The tune is not a real sound in the room — “seems to” marks it as something felt rather than heard — and the line that follows in the poem identifies it as “the tune of some song that she used to hum”. So the tune’s function is to bring the mother back.

• A is wrong: nothing in the extract says his play becomes more enjoyable; the tune is not part of the game.
• B is wrong: hover is a gentle word — something floating quietly above. Nothing is disrupted or broken off.
• D is wrong: the playthings do suggest childhood, but the line is about the tune, and the tune is a link to the past, not a symbol of carefree living. The whole extract is framed by loss — “I cannot remember my mother”.

(iii) The hovering tune acts as a bridge between the present and a past he cannot otherwise reach. While his hands are busy with toys in the present, the tune arrives from infancy and turns an ordinary hour of play into an act of remembering. It is the only fragment of his mother he still possesses, so it does the work a photograph or a face would normally do. The verb is exact: something that hovers neither lands nor leaves — it stays just out of reach, which is the condition of a memory he can feel but not hold. And “only sometimes” means he cannot summon it; it comes when it chooses.

(iv) TRUE. The extract states it directly — “only sometimes in the midst of my play”. The words only sometimes mean occasionally, not always; and seems to hover confirms it is intermittent and uncertain rather than continuous.

(v) Through the senses rather than through recollection. He has no image of her face, but three things reach him unasked: a sound (the tune of the song she hummed at his cradle), a smell (“the smell of the shiuli flowers”, “the scent of the morning service in the temple”), and a sight that is really a feeling (“the stillness of my mother’s gaze… has spread all over the sky”). Sound and smell are the senses that record earliest and last longest, so they survive from the years before he could form pictures or words. She is present to him as sensation and atmosphere — in the air, in the season, in the sky — rather than as a person he can call to mind.

(i) B. The sky is a symbolic extension of the mother’s presence. The extract begins “I feel that…”, which marks everything after it as the speaker’s inward sense, not a fact about the weather. The sky is being used to stand for a presence that is calm, vast and everywhere — that is symbolism.

• A is a literal misreading: nothing is physically in the sky, and the poem says “I feel”, not “I see”.
• C reverses the direction. The sky is not reflecting her feelings back at us; her stillness has spread outward into it.
• D contradicts the extract twice over — the stillness is her gaze, and it has “spread”, not vanished.

(ii) D. a sense of serenity. The word the poet has chosen is stillness, and stillness is calm, unmoving quiet. A gaze that is still is steady and untroubled; spread across a whole sky, it becomes peace on a very large scale. Test the others: grief (A) would need loss or weeping, and there is none in these three lines; anticipation (B) requires waiting for something, and nothing here is awaited; nostalgia (C) is a genuine temptation and is present in the poem as a whole, but this extract does not look back at all — it describes a present feeling of being watched over. Serenity is what the lines actually deliver.

(iii) FALSE. The effect is imagined and felt, not tangible. The controlling verb is “I feel that”, and the poem is describing an impression, not an event. Tangible means able to be touched or physically verified; a gaze cannot be touched, and nothing about the sky is actually altered. The image is vivid, which is why the statement is tempting — but a vivid image is still figurative. Had Tagore meant something physical, he would have written “I see”.

(iv) The comparison does three things at once.

• It solves the poem’s problem. He cannot remember her face, so he cannot describe it. By transferring her look to the sky, he gives her the only face still available to him — one he can see every day from his window.
• It makes her love limitless and constant. The sky is the largest thing there is, it is always overhead, and it is above him wherever he goes. A gaze that has “spread all over” it is a protection with no edges and no interruption.
• It matches quality to quality. A mother’s watchful look is silent, unhurried and undemanding — and so is a clear sky. The shared quality is named in the line itself: stillness.

Technically this is a metaphor, supported by personification — a human expression is given to the sky — and it is the poem’s final movement outward, from cradle to garden to the whole visible world.

(v) The tone of the poet in the given extract is calm, reverent and comforted because he speaks not of losing his mother but of finding her everywhere: the word “stillness” sets a hush over the lines, the long open vowels of “gaze”, “face” and “sky” slow the reading to the pace of someone looking up, and the verb “I feel” shows quiet acceptance rather than protest — there is no complaint, no exclamation and no question anywhere in the three lines.

The refrain does something unusual: it states a loss three times, and each time the lines that follow quietly disprove it. That contradiction is where its emotional force comes from.

• It sets a hush before each stanza. Coming first, it is a plain, unadorned admission — no adjectives, no self-pity, just a fact. The reader is made to feel the blank before anything is offered to fill it.
• It is then contradicted, three times. He cannot remember her — and yet a tune arrives, a scent arrives, a gaze covers the sky. Repeating the denial makes each recovery feel like something rescued rather than something owned. The poem is a record of what memory can do without a picture.
• It builds by accumulation. The first time it is information. The second time it is a pattern. By the third it has become the sound of the poem itself — so that the loss stops being an event and becomes the condition the speaker lives in.
• It sounds like the thing it describes. A line that returns at regular intervals is a rocking motion, and rocking is what the mother did at his cradle. The refrain performs the lullaby the speaker cannot fully recall.
• It keeps the poem from becoming sentimental. Each time the feeling begins to rise, the flat statement returns and steadies it. That restraint is why the poem moves readers instead of embarrassing them.

(i) The shiuli flowers. The connection is made by scent, and the poem states the transfer openly: “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.”

• Smell is the sense that bypasses thought — it arrives without being sent for, which is why it can carry a memory from before the speaker could form pictures. He does not go looking for his mother in early autumn; she reaches him.
• The shiuli carries a whole season with it. It flowers in early autumn, at the time of the Durga Puja, and it opens at night and drops before dawn, so a Bengali child finds the ground white each morning. The flower is therefore already associated with festival, freshness and something given quietly overnight — all of which now attach to the mother.
• Tagore then places it beside “the morning service in the temple”, so the flower’s scent and incense mix. The effect is to make the memory of the mother sacred: she is remembered in the same breath as worship, and the boy’s longing takes on the calm of a ritual rather than the sharpness of grief.

(ii) The humming tune. The connection is made by sound, and it is the earliest memory in the poem: “the tune of some song that she used to / hum while rocking my cradle.”

• Note the exactness of the loss. He has kept the tune and lost the song — “some song”, he says, not naming it. He cannot recall the words, only the shape of the melody, which is precisely what an infant would retain.
• The tune stands for her care in its most physical form: a voice bent over a cradle, keeping time with a rocking hand. Sound and movement together.
• The verb hover is the heart of it. A tune that hovers over his playthings is present in the room but cannot be caught, exactly like the mother herself — near, unreachable, and not going away.
• The word hum is also onomatopoeia, so the line makes the sound it is remembering. The reader hears what the speaker hears.

Nature is not a background in this poem — it is the medium through which the mother survives. Having no face to describe, the speaker locates her in the natural world, and nature does three distinct jobs.

• It carries the memory to him. The shiuli’s scent “floats in the air” of an early autumn morning; the sky waits outside his bedroom window. He never goes searching. Nature delivers her, unasked, which is why every stanza begins with helplessness — “only sometimes”, “but when”, “only when”.
• It gives her a form he can hold. A tune, a scent and a stretch of blue are the only shapes left to a mother without a remembered face. Nature supplies the vocabulary his memory lacks.
• It makes her permanent and vast. Autumn returns every year and the sky is always overhead, so a mother stored in them cannot be lost again. This is why the poem ends with her gaze “spread all over the sky”: nature converts a private, fading memory into something as reliable as a season.

Notice also the direction of movement. Stanza 1 is indoors among playthings; stanza 2 opens into an autumn morning and a temple; stanza 3 sends his eyes “into the blue of the distant sky”. As the poem moves outward into nature, the mother grows — from a voice at a cradle, to a scent over a neighbourhood, to a presence covering the whole visible world.

Four inferences, each supported by the poem.

• He sees it as a bond that does not depend on memory or presence. The speaker has lost the face, the name of the song, everything that could be called a recollection — and the relationship is still intact. “I cannot remember my mother” is said three times, and three times something of her arrives anyway. Tagore’s claim is that this particular bond is stored below the level at which we remember things.
• He sees it as sensory and wordless rather than spoken. There is not one word of conversation in the poem. What passes between mother and child is a hum, a scent and a look. The relationship is made of care rather than of exchange.
• He sees it as protective, calm and undemanding. The mother’s defining act in the poem is a gaze — steady, silent, asking nothing — and its defining quality is stillness. She is never shown instructing, correcting or even holding him; she watches over. That is a very particular idea of maternal love: constant attention without pressure.
• He sees it as sacred and boundless. Her scent is set beside “the morning service in the temple”, and her gaze is finally as wide as the sky. The poem raises the mother from a person to a presence — close to the way a divine presence is described — without ever saying so directly.

And one thing the poem refuses to do: it does not mourn. There is no bitterness at her early death, no anger, no “why”. The perception is one of quiet gratitude — the relationship is treated as something he still has, in a changed form, rather than as something taken away.