No Where To Play By Ticola Tyson

The poem is the lament of a child yearning for open spaces to play in. She is having a hard time to find the perfect place to play. The poet says that in big towns and cities there are hardly any open places for children to play in. The cities are congested. There are big buildings and multi-storey buildings. There are no doubt schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, offices and crowded markets but no open places in the neighborhood of the poor people’s house, no open space for their children to play in with the result that their childhood passes in slums in sheer poverty, dirt and disease. There is rubbish, filth and pools of stagnant water everywhere. There is disease, death and misery every where among the poor specially in large crowded towns.

The child just talks about all of the strange things that happen around her town and that everywhere she wants to play it is either dirty, noisy, or just bad and she is annoyed by that.

Questions and Answers

Q. Who is the speaker in this poem?
Ans. A poor child perhaps living in a crowded city is the speaker in this poem

Q. Does the speaker live in a city or a village? Which words or lines help to to decide that?
Ans. The child doesn’t find an open space to play in ( lines 1 to 10). There are many things in the poem that indicate that the speaker lives in a crowded city. For example, he says that there are dirt, filth, back streets, narrow lanes, parking spaces, main roads for heavy traffic, in addition to large and multi-storey buildings. Besides, there is noise and the danger of being crushed by fast-moving cars. In addition, there is exhaustion of engines, vehicles, trash, crowds of people, a dirty smell of gas, a traffic rush and a police officer on the roads.

Q. Which are particularly striking? why?
Ans. The way that the writer kept on adding questions while saying the poem stood out to me because usually, you would expect the reader to ask a question.

Q. What is the mood of the poem?
Ans. The poem is quite sad, depressing and worrying.


0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *