Comparison QuestionsCBSE Class 10 English — Answers That Span Two Chapters

Model Answer

Both texts present loss as something universal, which no one can escape, and both insist that the only real remedy is acceptance rather than denial. In 'The Ball Poem', a boy loses his ball to the water, and the poet deliberately refuses to comfort him with a replacement — 'no use to say there are other balls' — because the boy must learn on his own that some losses cannot be undone by money or substitutes. This is his first brush with 'the epistemology of loss': the knowledge that everyone must, sooner or later, learn 'how to stand up' again. In 'The Sermon at Benares', Kisa Gotami's grief over her dead son is far more extreme, but the lesson is identical. The Buddha sends her to fetch mustard seeds from a house death has never visited — and her failure to find even one such house teaches her that death is common to all, not a punishment singling her out. Both texts conclude that grief must give way to acceptance, and that this acceptance — not avoidance — is what allows a person to move forward.

Model Answer

Both texts link loss directly to growth — the idea that a person becomes stronger and wiser precisely through what is taken from them. In 'The Ball Poem', a boy's loss of his ball is a small, personal event, but the poet uses it to show the boy's first encounter with responsibility: he 'senses first responsibility in a world of possessions' and begins learning that loss, though painful, must be borne without being replaced by easy comfort. Nelson Mandela's loss is collective and political rather than personal — the freedom denied to him and to all Black South Africans under apartheid, purely because of race. Yet the transformation Mandela describes mirrors the boy's: he learns that courage is not the absence of fear but 'the triumph over it', a lesson forged directly through years of oppression and struggle. The scale differs enormously — one poem examines a single child's private grief, the other an entire nation's fight for dignity — but both agree that suffering, honestly faced rather than avoided, is what produces genuine maturity.

Model Answer

In both poems, nature acts quietly and briefly, yet leaves a lasting impression on how the reader perceives the world. In 'Dust of Snow', Robert Frost describes a small, almost accidental moment — a crow shaking down dust of snow from a hemlock tree onto the poet — that changes his mood from despair to hope, and 'saved some part of a day' he had otherwise regretted. Here, nature functions as an unexpected healer, working through creatures traditionally seen as ill-omened (the crow, the hemlock) to prove that a change of heart can come from the humblest source. In 'Fog' by Carl Sandburg, nature is not a healer but a quiet observer: the fog arrives 'on little cat feet', sits silently over the harbour and city, and moves on without a trace, described entirely through the extended metaphor of a cat. Sandburg's fog does not change anyone's mood — it simply exists, mysterious and self-contained. Together, the poems show nature working in two very different registers: Frost's nature intervenes and transforms, while Sandburg's nature merely observes and departs.

Model Answer

Both poems are by Robert Frost and both use images drawn from nature, but the emotional direction of each is entirely opposite. In 'Dust of Snow', the natural image is gentle and small in scale — snow falling from a hemlock tree, dislodged by a crow — and it works to uplift the poet, turning a day he 'had rued' into one redeemed by a moment of quiet grace. The poem's message is that even minor, unplanned encounters with nature can restore hope. 'Fire and Ice', in contrast, uses two forces of nature at their most extreme and destructive — fire, representing consuming desire, and ice, representing cold hatred — to warn that either human emotion, taken to excess, is capable of ending the world. Where 'Dust of Snow' finds redemption in nature's smallest gesture, 'Fire and Ice' finds catastrophe in nature's most powerful forces used as symbols for human passion and indifference. The contrast in scale and tone — quiet healing versus dramatic warning — is exactly what makes the two poems, though both about nature and mood, so different in effect.