Hornbill (Poem): Childhood · Class 11 · CBSE · Science English
Explain how the poem presents the loss of childhood and what the final reference to an innocent child’s face suggests.
Practice question from Hornbill (Poem): Childhood (Class 11 · CBSE · Science English), with the correct answer and a step-by-step solution.
medium · Subjective · Q-85E255
Explain how the poem presents the loss of childhood and what the final reference to an innocent child’s face suggests.
Answer: The poem presents the loss of childhood as a gradual awakening to rational thought, adult hypocrisy, and individual identity. The speaker cannot identify one exact moment when childhood ended, but he understands that innocence disappeared as his awareness increased. The innocent child’s face suggests that childhood still survives in the purity and simplicity of younger children, even though it has vanished from the speaker’s own consciousness.
Solution
The poem treats childhood as a state of innocence rather than merely an age. Its loss occurs through intellectual and emotional awareness, while the final image contrasts the speaker’s lost innocence with that of another child.
More from Hornbill (Poem): Childhood
- What is the central concern of Markus Natten’s poem “Childhood”?
- Which realisation in the poem shows the speaker’s movement from childish belief to rational thinking?
- Why does the speaker say that childhood may have gone when he noticed that adults were not what they appeared to be?
- In Markus Natten’s poem “Childhood,” the line “my mind was really mine” most strongly conveys:
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