Friday 26 June 2015

In "The Frog and the Nightingale," in the lines that begin with "Other creatures" and end with "morning night:" 1) Why did they have no choice?...

These questions refer to the last six lines of the first stanza of the poem. Let's take a look at that whole stanza:



"Once upon a time a frog


Croaked away in Bingle Bog


Every night from dusk to dawn


He croaked awn and awn and awn


Other creatures loathed his voice,


But, alas, they had no choice,


And the crass cacophony


Blared out from the sumac tree


At whose foot the frog each night


Minstrelled on till morning night"



Hopefully you can see how funny this situation is so far! The frog is croaking nonstop all night, and the other animals hate having to listen to it.



1) Why did they have no choice?


The other animals had no choice but to listen to the frog's awful croaking because there was nothing they could do about it. The bog is where they all live; they can't move, and they can't get the frog to shut up. In fact, in the next stanza, the other creatures try different ways of getting the frog to be quiet, but nothing works. Those first few lines indicate that the other creatures already have tried throwing sticks and stones and even bricks at the frog, praying for him to be quiet, insulting him directly, and complaining about the sound. Nothing works. He keeps croaking.


2) Why did other creatures loathe his voice?


It sounds terrible. It's loud. And it keeps going incessantly (on and on without stopping) all night long. Here's that same stanza again, with the evidence for this answer marked in bold:



"Once upon a time a frog


Croaked away in Bingle Bog


Every night from dusk to dawn


He croaked awn and awn and awn


Other creatures loathed his voice,


But, alas, they had no choice,


And the crass cacophony



Blared out from the sumac tree


At whose foot the frog each night


Minstrelled on till morning night"




(A cacophony is a terrible, awful, annoying sound. And when something blares out, that means it sounds really loud.)


3) Find a word from the passage which means "hated."


"Loathed" means "hated." When the speaker of the poem says that the other animals "loathed his voice," it means they really hated his voice.

No comments:

Post a Comment

How can a 0.5 molal solution be less concentrated than a 0.5 molar solution?

The answer lies in the units being used. "Molar" refers to molarity, a unit of measurement that describes how many moles of a solu...