NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 6 A Friend Found in Music (poem by Bryanna T. Perkins) — Critical Reflection

Book page 196 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.

I. Read the extract given below and answer the questions that follow. 1. Music is the therapy I need when I feel blue. Music lifts my spirits To make sure I pull through. (i) Complete the following sentence suitably. The phrase ‘feel blue’ indicates ___________.

Answer

Completed sentence: The phrase ‘feel blue’ indicates sadness — a low, gloomy state of mind, the sort of unhappiness in which nothing seems worth doing.

How the extract itself proves the meaning (you are not required to know the idiom beforehand):

Music is called a therapy in the line just above — and therapy is what you give to something that is unwell. So ‘blue’ must name a condition needing treatment.
The next line says music lifts her spirits. Anything that has to be lifted was low. ‘Blue’ is that low state.
The last line says she must pull through — an expression used of surviving something hard. Feeling blue is the difficulty being survived.

The poem also supplies the opposite: “The times when I’m most cheerful” in the next stanza. Cheerful and blue are the two poles of the poem.

Word note: in English, colours are commonly used for feelings — feeling blue (sad), seeing red (angry), green with envy, tickled pink. The book’s Vocabulary in Context exercise asks you to sort ‘feel blue’, ‘lifts my spirits’ and ‘most cheerful’ into positive and negative emotions; ‘feel blue’ is the one negative item among the three.

Q2.

(ii) Identify the line which shows music makes the poet happy.

Answer

“Music lifts my spirits” — the third line of the extract.

Why this line and not one of the others: read all four in order and watch what each one does.

“Music is the therapy” — names music’s role; it does not yet describe an effect.
“I need when I feel blue” — describes the problem, not the cure.
“Music lifts my spirits” — the only line in which the poet’s state actually changes for the better. ‘Spirits’ means mood or cheerfulness, and ‘lifts’ raises it.
“To make sure I pull through” — describes the purpose of that lifting, that is, survival rather than happiness.

Grammar note: ‘lift someone’s spirits’ is a fixed expression meaning to cheer someone up. Note that spirits in this sense is always plural — you cannot lift a person’s ‘spirit’ and mean the same thing.

Q3.

(iii) What does the last line of the extract signify?

Answer

The last line — “To make sure I pull through.” — signifies that music does something far larger than cheering the poet up: it carries her safely through a difficult period. It is the line that raises music from a comfort to a necessity.

Three things packed into eight short words:

‘Pull through’ is a phrasal verb the book glosses on the very next page as ‘to succeed in doing something very difficult’. It is the expression used of a patient who survives a serious illness. Choosing it tells us her low periods are not small moods.
‘To make sure’ gives music an intention. Music is not merely having a pleasant effect; it is written as though it were deliberately looking after her — which prepares the final stanza, where it becomes a friend.
The word ‘through’ implies a passage with another side to it. The poet is not asking music to remove the sadness, only to get her across it. That is a mature and honest claim, and it is why the poem does not sound like an advertisement for happiness.

Notice the arrangement of the stanza: the four lines move problem → cure → effect → outcome (feel blue → therapy → lifts my spirits → pull through). The last line is the outcome, which is exactly why it carries the weight.

Q4.

(iv) State whether the following sentence is true or false. Music plays a vital role in the poet’s life.

Answer

True.

‘Vital’ means necessary for life, and the extract makes exactly that claim. She does not say she enjoys music; she says “I need it when I feel blue”, and that its work is “to make sure I pull through” — the language of survival, not of pleasure. Calling it a therapy puts it in the same category as treatment.

Support from the rest of the poem: the claim holds outside the extract too. Music is present in her happiness — “The times when I’m most cheerful, / It’s clear, music was there” — and in her loneliness — “Music is the needed friend / When no one seems to care.” Something present at both extremes of a life, and needed at both, is by definition vital.

Q5.

(v) Select the central idea of the extract from the following options. A. Music brings comfort during sadness. B. Music is a necessity in times of happiness. C. Music improves our ability to pull heavy loads. D. Music is a source of knowledge and excitement.

Answer

A. Music brings comfort during sadness.

All four lines of the extract are about a low mood and its relief: therapy → feel blue → lifts my spirits → pull through. That is comfort during sadness, stated once as a metaphor and once as an effect.

Option	Why it is wrong
B	Happiness is not the subject of this extract at all — it appears only in the next stanza (“The times when I’m most cheerful”). An extract question must be answered from the printed lines.
C	A trap built on a literal misreading of ‘pull through’. The phrase has nothing to do with pulling anything; it means to survive a difficulty. This is exactly why the book teaches phrasal verbs alongside this poem.
D	Neither knowledge nor excitement is mentioned. The extract’s mood is quiet relief, not excitement — and nothing here is being learnt.

Tip for ‘central idea’ questions: the right option must cover the whole extract and nothing outside it. Option B is true of the poem but not of these four lines; option C uses words from the extract but not their meaning. Test both conditions before you choose.

Q6.

II. 1. How is music able to move the poet ‘to the core’?

Answer

Because music works on her through rhythm — and rhythm is felt in the body before it is understood by the mind, so it reaches the innermost part of her without needing words at all.

The poet builds the claim in two lines: “Music is the rhythm / That moves me to the core.” She does not say melody or lyrics; she names the beat. A beat is physical — feet tap, breath and pulse fall in with it. That is why she can use a verb of physical movement (moves) for an emotional effect, and why the image works: the outward tapping and the inward stirring are the same event described at two depths.

What ‘to the core’ contributes: the core of a thing is its centre — the part that cannot be reached from outside. By choosing that word she claims music passes every outer defence: thought, mood, distraction. And she admits she cannot explain the process — the book’s own paraphrase of the line is “moving me in ways I can’t explain”. The inexplicability is part of the point: a thing that reaches the core does not have to argue its way in.

Read it beside Act III of the play: Nabin Sharma has all the arguments on his side and gives them up because “Shruti’s father taps his feet” — his body agrees before his opinion does. That is Perkins’s line dramatised: rhythm moves a person to the core, past whatever he happens to believe.

Q7.

II. 2. Why does the poet compare music to a ‘needed friend’?

Answer

Because a friend is defined by presence in the right moment, and that is precisely what the poet values in music — the second half of her line makes the condition explicit: “Music is the needed friend / When no one seems to care.”

The comparison is doing three jobs:

It makes music a companion rather than a possession. Everything else in the poem is a thing — an ocean, a rhythm, a therapy. A friend is a somebody. Placing this metaphor last is deliberate: the poem moves from what music is like to who it is like.
It stresses dependability. The adjective is not ‘good’ or ‘close’ but ‘needed’. Music is not one friend among many; it is the friend she must have, and the one that never fails to turn up.
It answers loneliness, not sadness. ‘Blue’ was treated by therapy in the previous stanza; loneliness needs company instead. Notice her careful wording — “When no one seems to care”. She does not claim nobody cares; she says it seems so. Music is what keeps her company through a feeling that may not even be true.

The title is the proof: the poem is called A Friend Found in Music, so the whole poem is written towards this one metaphor. Everything before it — ocean, rhythm, therapy — is evidence for the friendship claimed at the end.

Q8.

II. 3. Explain the poet’s attitude towards music.

Answer

Her attitude is one of grateful dependence. She treats music not as something she enjoys but as something she relies on — and she is entirely open about needing it.

The evidence is in her grammar as much as in her statements. In almost every sentence music is the subject and the poet is the object: music pulls me, moves me, lifts my spirits, is the friend. She never once writes ‘I listen to music’ or ‘I play music’. She has placed herself in the receiving position throughout, which is exactly how a person describes something they depend on.

Aspect of her attitude	Line that shows it
Reverence — music is vast, and she is drawn to it	“Music is the ocean / That pulls me to the shore.”
Need — it is treatment, not pastime	“Music is the therapy / I need when I feel blue.”
Trust — it will not fail her	“To make sure I pull through.”
Gratitude — it is present in her good times too	“The times when I’m most cheerful, / It’s clear, music was there.”
Affection — the relationship is personal	“Music is the needed friend / When no one seems to care.”

The line that is most easily missed: “It’s clear, music was there.” She is looking back at her happiest times and discovering that music was in all of them. That is not a claim about what music does to her — it is a realisation about her own past, and it turns the poem from a tribute into something closer to a thank-you note. Her attitude, in one word, is indebted.

Q9.

II. 4. Support the opinion that this poem has a universal appeal.

Answer

The poem has universal appeal because it removes everything that could make it belong to one person, one place or one kind of music. Four features do that work.

No genre is named. There is no raga, no song, no band, no instrument anywhere in the twelve lines. A reader in Guwahati and a reader in Paraguay can both supply their own music without contradicting a single word.
No situation is described. We are never told what made her feel blue, or who failed to care. Because the cause is left empty, every reader can put his or her own cause into it.
The feelings chosen are the commonest ones there are — sadness, cheerfulness, loneliness, relief. Not one of them depends on age, country, class or language.
The language is plain and the form is song-like. Short lines, everyday words, an abcb rhyme — nothing that needs a footnote. The poem can be read by a child and by an adult with equal ease.

The strongest argument, though, is the one the chapter itself supplies. Set the poem beside the play printed just before it. Twin Melodies is about a quarrel between Hindustani classical music and Indo-Western fusion — a very specific dispute — and it ends with a father admitting that both are music. Perkins’s poem states in twelve lines what that whole play spends three Acts proving: that what matters is what music does for a person, not which tradition it comes from. Placing them together in one chapter is the editors’ way of showing that the poem’s claim survives the play’s argument.

Be fair about the limits too. The universality is bought at a price: because nothing is specific, the poem cannot give us the pleasure of a particular scene the way a more detailed poem could. A strong answer names that trade-off rather than only praising the poem.

Q10.

II. 5. Compare your experience of music with the feelings expressed in the poem.

Answer

This asks for your experience set beside the poem, so the answer must do two things at once: report honestly, and point to the exact line you agree or disagree with.

What a good answer needs:

Quote or name a line from the poem in each paragraph — otherwise it is not a comparison.
Give one concrete occasion from your own life, not a general statement about liking music.
Include at least one point where your experience differs. A comparison in which everything matches is usually not honest.
Keep it to a short paragraph or two. Do not retell the poem.

Sample answer: Two of the poet’s claims match my experience exactly, and one does not.

“Music is the therapy / I need when I feel blue” is true for me almost word for word. During the week of my half-yearly results last year I could not concentrate on anything, and what got me back to work was putting on the same instrumental track on repeat until the room felt ordinary again. Like her, I did not want music that cheered me up; I wanted music that let me keep going. Her phrase “to make sure I pull through” describes that better than I could.

“The times when I’m most cheerful, / It’s clear, music was there” is also true, though I only noticed it after reading the poem. When I think of Bihu, of my cousin’s wedding, of the last day of school before the holidays, there is a drum in every one of those memories. Music was not the reason I was happy, but it was present each time.

Where I differ is with the last stanza. Perkins turns to music “When no one seems to care” — music replaces company for her. For me music is usually shared: it is my brother’s speaker in the next room, or forty of us singing badly on a bus. Her music is a private friend; mine is mostly a crowd. Reading the poem made me realise that this difference is probably about circumstance rather than taste — I have not often had to be alone with it.

Why the disagreement improves the answer: the question says compare, and a comparison needs contrast to be visible. Naming the one place where the poem does not fit you shows that you have read it closely enough to test it, rather than agreeing with it out of politeness.

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