NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 7 Words (poem by Charles Swain) — Critical Reflection

Because a pilgrim is a traveller who is always on the way to something he has not yet reached, carrying almost nothing and depending on what the road provides — and that is exactly the condition of the human heart in this poem.

Take the three things the word carries, and match each to the extract:

• A pilgrim is journeying, never settled. “upon earth” makes the whole world only a road to be crossed. The heart is not at home here; it is passing through, still looking.
• A pilgrim is in need. The very next line says so — “Finds often, when it needs”. A pilgrim on the road asks for water and shelter; the heart asks for comfort, understanding, truth.
• A pilgrim seeks something sacred. That raises what the heart wants above mere pleasure. It wants something worth the journey — and it is handed “just so many weeds”.

At the moments when feeling has outrun a person’s ability to bear it alone — grief, fear, loneliness, shame, and equally the joy that is unbearable unless it is shared. The extract does not list these occasions, but it tells you their shape: the heart is “a pilgrim”, and a pilgrim needs help at the hard stretches of the road.

• In sorrow — after a death or a loss, when a person needs to be told that someone understands.
• In loneliness — the situation the poem names directly two stanzas later: “A lonely home to cheer”.
• In fear or doubt — before an examination, an operation, a decision that cannot be undone.
• In joy — a happiness nobody else knows about is only half a happiness.
• When a wrong must be set right — an apology or a forgiveness that cannot be given by gesture alone.

Completed sentence: The words are like weeds because they spring up in great numbers without being asked for or cultivated, they look like the real thing, and they are of no use to the heart that needs them — they only crowd out the little that was worth saying.

Two emotions: disappointment and loneliness.

They suggest that communication is unreliable exactly where it matters most: language is plentiful and easy, but it does not automatically carry feeling from one person to another.

Three claims are packed into the four lines:

• Communication is not the same as speaking. Words were produced — there is no shortage of them, “just so many” — and yet nothing arrived. Transmission happened; communication did not.
• Quantity is no help, and may be a hindrance. The image is of a crowd of weeds, not of a drought. Stanza 3 states the same point directly: “hosts of words, which reach the head, / But never touch the heart.”
• The failure is worst under pressure. “when it needs” — ordinary conversation gets by comfortably; grief and love are where language gives way.

Words satisfy the chest when they actually fill the emptiness a person feels inside — when what is said answers the need and the listener is left content, the way a meal leaves a hungry man content.

Two things to notice in the phrase itself:

• ‘Chest’ stands for the seat of feeling — a figure of speech (metonymy), like heart in stanza 1. Swain switches from heart to chest so that the fifth stanza can echo the first without simply repeating it — and because chest is more physical, a hollow that could be filled. That is what makes the feast image in the next line follow so naturally.
• ‘Satisfy’ is a word about appetite. You satisfy hunger. Applying it to speech says that the need for the right words is as bodily as the need for food.

Words are ‘summoned to the test’ when a real situation calls on them to do their work — when someone is grieving, frightened or alone and speech must actually console, persuade or repair. At that moment the words are put on trial, and the poet says they usually fail: they “Oft satisfy the least!”

It implies universal, shared contentment — everybody, everywhere, satisfied at once and celebrating together. It is a hyperbole, and it is deliberately the largest picture of happiness the poet can build.

• ‘The world’ — not one person, not one village. If words worked, the good would not be private; it would reach everyone, since everyone has words.
• ‘A feast’ — not merely food but a shared occasion. One does not have a feast, one holds one, with hosts and guests. So the image is of people gathered, which is exactly what words are supposed to do and, in this poem, never do.
• ‘Might’ — the whole picture is conditional. Swain lets it exist for one line only.

Completed sentence: The poet mentions that words satisfy the least because when they are actually put to the test they reach only the head and not the heart — they are produced in crowds, they cost the speaker nothing, and so they leave the listener’s real need untouched, exactly as summer birds leave “but empty air”.

Answer: A. always.

Oft is the old, poetic short form of often — it means many times, frequently. The poem uses it twice: “Hath oft the fewest words to say” and “Oft satisfy the least!”

The poet compares words to summer birds that fly away and leave nothing behind but empty air — so words, once spoken, vanish, and the place where they were is emptier than before.

Three things the comparison establishes:

• Words have no substance. Air is the very image of nothing you can hold. What was said cannot be kept, weighed or eaten.
• Words are seasonal. Summer birds come with the warm weather and go when it ends — like the affectionate things people say when everything is easy.
• Their going leaves a loss. The word is empty, not merely ‘air’. Air was there before the birds arrived too; what has changed is that the sky is now noticeably without them. So the poet is saying that fine words can leave a person worse off than if nothing had been said — because a hope was raised.

The poet’s claim is that value in speech comes from truth and fitness, not from quantity — and he states it in the poem’s central stanza:

Read the terms of the comparison carefully:

Yes — the poem is built out of contrast, and the contrast is its argument. Swain does not say words are worthless; he sets two kinds of words against each other in every stanza and shows that the difference between them is truth and restraint, not eloquence.

Loneliness runs under the whole poem, because everything Swain describes is a failure to reach another person. Here is the evidence, stanza by stanza.

• Stanza 1 — the empty sky. “But words, like summer birds, depart, / And leave but empty air.” The company goes, and what remains is emptiness. Loneliness is not stated; it is left behind as a condition.
• Stanza 2 — the solitary traveller. “The heart, a pilgrim upon earth”. A pilgrim walks alone, far from home, and the earth itself is only a road. When even words fail him he has nothing and no one.
• Stanza 3 — reached but not touched. “hosts of words, which reach the head, / But never touch the heart.” This is the loneliest line in the poem: a person surrounded by talk and still not met. Being spoken to is not the same as being kept company.
• Stanza 4 — the word itself. “A lonely home to cheer”. The only cure the poem offers is offered to a lonely house, which tells you what state Swain takes to be normal.
• Stanza 5 — the feast nobody attends. “The world might hold a feast” is imagined and then withdrawn. The poem lets us picture everyone gathered together, and then takes the gathering away in the next line.
• Stanza 6 — barrenness. A plant “All blossom to the root” that cannot grow “One particle of fruit” produces no seed and no future. Nothing goes on from it, and nothing is shared.

He conveys it through a chain of images that all have the same shape — bright on the surface, nothing underneath — and he prescribes the remedy in stanza 3: say little, and say it truly.

How the superficiality is conveyed

Two techniques do the work. First, the vocabulary of excess and display — hosts, gaudy, show, just so many — which passes judgement before any argument is made. Second, the structure of every stanza: a promise raised in the first two lines and cancelled by a “But” in the third. The reader is made to feel let down five times over, which is what superficiality feels like from the receiving end.

What ought to be done

• Say less. “A little said”; “the fewest words to say”. Restraint is the first rule, because quantity is what buries meaning.
• Mean what you say. “and truly said”. Sincerity is what turns a sentence into something a listener can feel.
• Aim at the person, not at the point. The poem’s model speaker is the voice that “wins its sunny way, / A lonely home to cheer” — words shaped for the one who needs them.
• Let action and silence do part of the work. If words leave “empty air”, then presence, help and even silence must carry the rest. Emily Dickinson, quoted later in this chapter, puts it exactly: “Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.”