Class 6 English Chapter 2: The Raven and the Fox

A bird, a branch and a fox

The poem opens with two animals and a piece of food. Mr Raven is perched on a limb, which is simply a branch. Reynard the Fox is on the ground below, looking up.

What the Fox wants

In the Raven's beak is a morsel. That is a small piece of food, and the poem says the Fox would travel a long way to get hold of one.

The problem he has

The Fox cannot climb the tree. He cannot reach the branch, and snatching is out of the question. Whatever he does has to be done from the ground with nothing but his voice.

He begins with the feathers

So he looks up and admires. What a handsome creature you are, he says, and what feathers. Notice the Sir. He is not merely being pleasant; he is treating the Raven as somebody important.

Then comes the request

Next he wonders aloud what would happen if the Raven sang. The birds of these woods, he says, would call you King. It sounds like a compliment. It is an instruction.

Why the request is a trap

Here is the hinge of the whole poem. A beak holding food cannot open without dropping it. Agreeing to sing and letting go of the morsel are not two things. They are one thing.

The Raven knows better

This is what makes the poem sharp. The Raven's voice is a croak and he has always known it. Nothing new has been discovered about him.

He forgets on purpose

But he missed the joke entirely, and let go of what he knew about his own voice. Forgetting is easier when somebody has just called you handsome.

Foolish pride

So he opens his beak in foolish pride. The poem names it exactly. Not hunger, not kindness, not confusion. Pride.

Down comes the morsel

Down comes the food, into the waiting mouth below. Eyed is the word the poem uses, and it is a good one. The Fox had been watching that piece of food from the first line.

The Fox does not run

He laughs first. Ha-ha, he says, and now you know. Most thieves would leave. This one stays to explain, because the poem needs the lesson said out loud.

The lesson in his own words

Ignore sweet words that make you glow. That is the warning, and glow is well chosen. Flattery feels warm, and the warmth is exactly what stops you thinking.

A second lesson

Then he adds that pride is rather unwise, and that the teaching is quite a surprise. He is enjoying himself. The Raven has paid for the lesson with his breakfast.

Nothing was stolen

Worth noticing at the end: the Fox never takes anything. He talks, and the Raven hands it over. That is what makes the poem a warning rather than a crime story.

Who wrote it

The poem is by Jean de La Fontaine, who put many old fables into French verse. This one has been told for centuries, sometimes with a crow, sometimes with cheese.

Last things to hold on to

A fable uses animals so the lesson can be aimed at everybody without pointing at anyone. Nobody in the class is the Raven, and so everybody can be. Say the poem out loud once. The Fox's lines are smooth and unhurried, and that smoothness is part of the trick. Flattery rarely arrives sounding rushed. The Raven loses a mouthful of food, which is a small loss. What the poem is really counting is something else. He gave away his own good sense, and he did it while feeling excellent about himself.

Scenario:

A class is asked to write one sentence saying what happens in the poem. Nineteen pupils out of thirty write that the Fox steals the morsel or tricks the Raven into giving it up. Kabir writes something different. He says the Raven drops his own food while trying to prove he can sing. Their teacher reads both versions out and asks the class to find, anywhere in the poem, a line where the Fox touches the food or the bird. Nobody can. She then asks why so many of them wrote steal anyway.

Analysis:

Nineteen pupils reached for a word the poem never supports, and the poem is four stanzas long.

Activity:

Write the same sentence twice, once using only words for what the Fox says and once using only words for what the Raven does.

Title:

The full beak test

What You Notice:

The ball falls as soon as the jaws open far enough to matter. There is no setting where the peg is open and the ball is still held. That is the Raven's problem exactly. Agreeing to sing was agreeing to let go, and no amount of care would have made both possible at once.

Ravens really do croak. They are among the noisiest birds in the crow family, and their call is nothing like a song.

Reynard is an old name for a fox in European stories, used for hundreds of years before this poem was written.

Jean de La Fontaine retold more than two hundred fables in French verse, most of them far older than he was.

How the Fox works — PRAISE - ASK - CATCH — He praises the feathers, asks for a song, and catches the food that falls. Three steps, and the Raven performs the third one for him.

What the Raven forgets — A full beak cannot sing — One line holds the whole poem. He could keep his food or open his mouth, and flattery made the choice look easy.

Endings that chime

Read the first two lines of the poem aloud and something clicks. Limb and him finish with the same sound. That is a rhyme, and this poem is full of them.

Two by two

The pairing is regular. Line one goes with line two, line three with line four, all the way through. Two rhyming lines side by side are called a couplet.

Rhyme is about hearing

Now look at joke and croak. They share only two letters, yet they rhyme perfectly. Spelling had nothing to do with it. Your ear made the decision before your eye got involved.

The trap in the spelling

The reverse trap is worse. Word and sword look like an obvious pair and do not rhyme at all, because the w in sword is silent. Never trust the look of a word here.

A test you can use

Cover everything before the last vowel and say what remains. Pride leaves ide. Eyed leaves the same. Two words, one ending, one rhyme.

The poem's pairs

Work through the stanzas and you will find them: limb and him, word and bird, sing and King, joke and croak, pride and eyed, know and glow, unwise and surprise.

Why a poet bothers

Rhyme is not decoration. It makes lines stick. Fables in verse have travelled for centuries partly because a rhymed line is so much harder to forget than a plain one.

Words at the far end

Now a different job. An opposite is a word at the far end of the same idea. Remembered and forgot are both about holding something in mind, and they sit at the two ends of it.

Not simply different

This is worth being careful about. Forgot and hungry are different words, not opposites. To be opposites, two words have to be arguing about the same thing.

Opposites in this poem

Perched has flew at the other end, since one is settling and the other is leaving. Foolish has wise. Laughed has cried. Ignore has notice, and glow has dim.

A harder pair

Pride and humility are opposites too, but not of action. They describe how a person holds their own worth, one reaching up and the other keeping level.

Sounds at the front

Last, listen to the front of words rather than the end. The poem has a line about a great big beak, and big and beak both open with /b/.

What alliteration is exactly

That repeated opening consonant in neighbouring words is alliteration. Two things make it narrow: the sound has to come at the start, and the words have to stand close together.

One more in the poem

Stanza two runs on /w/. Woods and would knock against each other as the Fox describes the crown he is offering.

Fronts and ends

So keep the two apart. Rhyme lives at the ends of words and usually at the ends of lines. Alliteration lives at the fronts, in words standing side by side.

Last things to hold on to

The two do different jobs, which is why one poem can use them together. Rhyme binds the ends of lines and gives the whole poem a shape you can hold in your head. Alliteration works inside a single line. Both reward saying the words out loud. Silent reading hurries past sound, and these are effects the ear notices long before the eye does. Read this poem aloud and the couplets arrive on their own. Ends chime and fronts knock. Once you have that sentence in your head, neither of the two is hard to find in any poem you happen to meet.

Scenario:

A teacher writes four pairs on the board and asks the class to tick the ones that rhyme. The pairs are joke and croak, word and bird, word and sword, and bough and cough. Ritu works fast. She ticks word and sword because the letters match almost exactly, and she crosses out joke and croak because they share only two. She ticks bough and cough for the same reason. Her neighbour Sam says every one of her answers is upside down. The teacher asks the whole class to close their eyes and listen while she reads the four pairs aloud.

Analysis:

A pupil marked sound by looking. Every answer came out backwards, which is not a coincidence.

Activity:

Find three pairs of words that look alike and do not rhyme, and try them on a partner.

Title:

Build a couplet of your own

What You Notice:

Some words give you four rhymes in a moment and others give you almost none. You will also find at least one word that looked like a rhyme on the page and vanished the moment you said it. That is the spelling trap, and now you have caught one yourself.

Word and sword look like a perfect rhyme and are not one, because the w in sword has been silent for hundreds of years.

Rhyme was a memory tool long before it was a decoration. Verse that chimes is far harder to forget, which is how many old fables survived at all.

Tongue twisters and advertising slogans use alliteration for the same reason poets do: a repeated opening consonant catches the ear before the meaning arrives.

Finding a rhyme — Cover the start, listen to the end — Hide everything before the last vowel and say what is left. If two words leave the same sound behind, they rhyme, whatever the spelling was doing.

Rhyme against alliteration — Ends chime, fronts knock — Rhyme happens at the end of words and usually at the end of lines. Alliteration happens at the front, in words standing side by side.

From lines to sentences

The poem tells its story in rhyming lines. Retelling it means saying the same thing in ordinary sentences, which sounds easy until you try it.

What you keep

Keep the people, the events and the reasons. A Raven with food. A Fox who cannot climb. Praise, a request, an open beak, a fall, a laugh. Lose any of those and it stops being this story.

What you may drop

Let go of the rhyme and the line breaks. Prose does not need them, and forcing them in makes a retelling sound like a poem that has gone wrong.

Starting it off

A retelling usually needs a sentence the poem never had, simply to set the scene. Something like: one morning a raven sat in a tree with his breakfast, and a hungry fox happened to pass underneath.

Giving it a different ending

Now the harder task. You may change how it finishes, but the new ending has to grow from the story you were given.

The rule for a new ending

Same characters, different choice. The Raven may decide to keep his beak shut. He may fly away. He may drop the food on purpose, on the Fox's head. All of those are things this bird could do.

Where new endings fail

An ending fails when somebody stops being themselves. A Raven who delivers a clever speech has become a different bird, and the reader notices at once, because the whole poem depends on his beak being full.

Writing it as a conversation

Last, write the scene as a conversation. Two characters, one of them talking a great deal, and here is the difficulty.

One character cannot speak

The Raven is holding food. He cannot be given a single line, because any line means an open beak, and an open beak means the story is over.

So he acts instead

Everything he does goes in brackets. He nods. He puffs out his chest. He turns his head so the light catches his feathers. The audience reads all of it, and he has not said a word.

That is not a limitation

It sounds like a problem and is actually a gift. A character who can only act has to be shown rather than explained, and showing is what a scene does best.

Listening carefully

There is a listening task in this unit too, about what the bird did afterwards. You mark statements true or false.

Judge what was said

The rule there is simple and easy to forget. Mark what the account actually said, not what seems sensible. A statement can be perfectly reasonable and still be false for this particular telling.

Bringing in puppets

Finally, the unit suggests making stick puppets and performing the poem. A puppet helps because the audience watches the character instead of the person holding it.

Few moves, clearly done

A puppet has no face to work with, so everything happens in movement. A nod, a turn, a slow droop. Three or four clear moves will carry a whole scene.

Last things to hold on to

Size matters more than you expect. A small gesture disappears past the second row, so a puppet has to do everything larger than feels natural in your hand. Puppets also work best doing one thing at once. If the Raven lifts his head and turns and hesitates together, the audience sees only a wobble. Separate the moves and each one lands. Retelling, changing the ending, writing the silent part and staging it are not four separate exercises. Each asks the same thing in a different form. What does the person at the other end actually receive?

Scenario:

A Class 6 group in Kochi chose this poem for their morning assembly. They first retold it as a story, and argued about whether to keep the rhyme. In the end they dropped it, because their rhyming sentences kept bending the meaning. Divya wanted a new ending, so the Raven refuses to sing and flies off with his breakfast. Their teacher asked them to check one thing: could this bird really have done that? They agreed he could. Then came the script. Ravi was given the Raven and complained that he had no lines at all. He ended up with seven bracketed actions and the loudest applause, because the audience watched him decide.

Analysis:

One poem, three jobs: retell it, change it and stage it, with each job testing a different kind of care.

Activity:

Retell any short poem you know as a story, then give it one new ending and test it against the same question the teacher asked.

Title:

An ending that could really happen

What You Notice:

Almost every first attempt has the Raven suddenly outwitting the Fox, or the Fox apologising and handing the food back. Both feel satisfying and neither is possible, because nothing earlier in the poem suggests either character could do it. An ending is not free. It has to be built out of the people you were already given, and the test your partner applies is exactly the right one: not whether they liked it, but where they stopped believing it.

Stick puppets are among the oldest kinds of theatre in India, and shadow puppet traditions in several states are hundreds of years old.

Silent film actors had the Raven's problem for a whole career, and solved it the same way, with actions an audience could read from a distance.

Many fables exist in several endings at once, because tellers changed them freely long before anyone wrote them down.

What to keep in a retelling — WHO - WHAT - WHY — Keep the people, the events and the reasons. Rhyme and line breaks are the parts you are allowed to drop, because prose does not need them.

A new ending that works — Same characters, different choice — You may change what somebody decides. You may not change who they are. A Raven who suddenly outwits the Fox is a different bird.