Class 6 English Chapter 5: A Friend's Prayer

Twelve lines that ask for something

Most poems tell you about a thing. This one asks for something instead, and the asking is what makes it a prayer rather than a description. Everything in it is something the speaker wants to become true.

How you can tell

Listen to the opening words of the requests. May, and let me. Nobody uses those to report what happened. They are the words of somebody asking. Once you have noticed them, the shape of the whole poem is clear.

Wish, hope or prayer

Before the poem your book gives three sentences. I wish my friend brings idli. I hope we win the race. May my friend get well soon. Only the last one is really a prayer. The other two are perfectly good sentences doing different jobs.

What separates them

A wish is usually something you want for yourself. A hope is about how things might turn out. A prayer of this kind asks for good on somebody else's behalf.

The first request

Stanza one asks that friendship stay the most important thing in her life. Not one friendship in particular. The whole business of having friends at all. She is asking about a habit of life rather than about any one person.

Blessed, and what follows from it

She says her special friends leave her feeling blessed, which here means deeply grateful rather than lucky. And because of that, she asks to be allowed to give her very best. The gratitude is the reason, and the effort is what she asks to be allowed to make.

Gratitude turning into work

Notice the order. The gratitude comes first and the effort comes out of it. She is not being kind in order to earn friends. She already has them, and wants to deserve them.

The second request

Stanza two refuses to settle for sympathy. Caring about what a friend is hoping for, and listening to their plans, is a fine thing. She says plainly that she wants to do a great deal more than that.

More than listening

What she asks for is to try everything a friend can do to make those wishes actually happen. Listening is easy. Helping costs time, and that is the difference she is pointing at. Anybody can agree that a friend's plan sounds good. Far fewer will give up an afternoon to it.

The third request

Stanza three moves from doing to understanding. She asks to use her heart to see, and to work out what friends can really be.

No judgements from afar

Then the sharpest line in the poem. She asks to make no judgements from a distance. Deciding about somebody you have not come close enough to know is exactly what she wants to stop doing. It is the one line in the poem that names a fault rather than a hope.

As they are

And the last request is the hardest. To love her friends the way they are, with no list of improvements attached and no waiting for them to change first. That is easy to agree with and remarkably hard to do.

Who is being asked to change

Read the whole poem again and count the requests aimed at a friend. There are none. Every single one is about the speaker herself.

Why that is unusual

Most of us, asked what would improve our friendships, would begin with something somebody else could do. This poem never does, and that is what makes it worth reading twice.

Nobody is named

There is also no description of any actual friend. No names, no faces, nothing they did last week. That empty space is deliberate, and it is where your own friends go.

Who wrote it

The poem is by Jill Wolf, who has written a great many short verses about ordinary feelings.

Scenario:

A teacher asks her class to write down what the speaker wants from her friends. Most of the class write answers like loyalty, kindness or time. Ishaan hands in a blank sheet. He says the question cannot be answered, because the speaker never asks her friends for anything at all. He has gone through the poem line by line. Every request begins with let me or may I, and each one asks for a change in herself. The teacher reads the class's answers out and asks them to find the line each one came from.

Analysis:

A blank sheet, and it was the closest reading in the room.

Activity:

Rewrite one stanza so that it asks the friends to change, and read both versions aloud.

Title:

Sort your own three sentences

What You Notice:

The wish and the hope are easy to muddle, because both can be about you and both can be about the future. The one beginning May usually stands out at once, and almost always turns out to be about somebody else. That is the difference the poem is built on, and you will have found it yourself rather than being told it.

The word blessed here means deeply grateful rather than lucky, which is why thankful is closer to it than excited.

Poems that ask rather than describe are among the oldest kinds there are, and most languages have them.

Jill Wolf has written many short verses about everyday feelings, which are often printed on cards for people to give away.

What the three stanzas ask for — VALUE - DO - ACCEPT — Stanza one asks to value friendship most. Stanza two asks to do something about it. Stanza three asks to accept friends as they are. Three requests, in that order.

Who the poem asks to change — Every line points inward — Not one request is aimed at a friend. Each one asks the speaker herself to be better, which is unusual and is the whole point of it.

Words that live nearby

The poem says the speaker feels blessed. Your book then offers five words and asks which are closest to it: excited, grateful, understood, thankful, relaxed. Three of the five are not close at all, which is the point of the exercise.

Which two fit

Grateful and thankful. Both are about being glad for something somebody has given you, which is exactly what the line means. Either of them could stand in the poem without changing its sense.

Why the others do not

Excited is about energy, relaxed is about calm, and understood is about being known. None of them is wrong as a word. They are simply about other things. A word can be perfectly good and still belong somewhere else entirely.

Neighbours, not twins

Words like grateful and thankful are called synonyms. They sit close together in meaning and can often swap places. Close, though, is not the same as identical. If two words did the same job in every sentence, a language would quietly lose one of them.

Shades

Most near neighbours differ in strength. Pleased, delighted and overjoyed all describe being happy, and they are three different amounts of it. Putting them in the wrong order is enough to make a sentence sound odd without breaking a single rule.

Getting the shade wrong

That is why a sentence can be correct and still sound odd. Saying you were overjoyed that the bus arrived is not a grammar mistake. It is the wrong size of word.

A thesaurus will not choose

A book of near neighbours lists what you could say. It cannot tell you which one belongs in your sentence, because that depends on the shade you meant. It shows you the whole street and leaves you to knock on a door.

Now words for a person

The second half of this topic is different. The book asks for qualities of a good friend, and offers a small list to complete: loyal, helpful, kind, caring, honest.

What a quality is

A quality describes what somebody is generally like, not what they did on one afternoon. Honest is a quality. Told the truth on Tuesday is an action.

Why that matters

One action does not make a quality. A person is honest because they tell the truth repeatedly, including the times when a lie would have been easier. The easy occasions prove very little, which is why qualities take time to establish.

Loyal

Loyal means staying with somebody, particularly when staying is inconvenient. Anybody can be loyal while things are going well, which is why the word is usually tested later.

Kind, caring, helpful

These three are close and not identical. Kind is how you treat people. Caring is noticing what somebody needs. Helpful is doing something about it once you have noticed.

They come in order

Read that again and the sequence appears. You notice, and then you act. Caring without helpful stops at sympathy, which is exactly the gap the poem's second stanza complains about.

Proving a quality

The strongest way to describe a friend is to name the quality and then give the evidence. She is loyal, because she stayed beside me when the rest of the class did not.

Why the proof matters

A list of quality words on their own says very little. Everybody's friend is kind and helpful. The behaviour is what makes the description that particular person's. Without it you have written about a type of person rather than about anybody you actually know, and a reader will tell the difference almost at once.

Scenario:

The class is asked which word is closest to blessed as the poem uses it. Half the room writes lucky. Half writes thankful. Both sides insist the other is wrong, and both can point to everyday sentences where their word works. Their teacher puts the line back on the board and asks one question about it. Is the speaker describing her good fortune, or is she describing how she feels about it? Lucky answers the first. Thankful answers the second.

Analysis:

Two defensible answers, until the line they came from was put back.

Activity:

Find three sentences using blessed, and say for each whether lucky or thankful fits.

Title:

Find the right size

What You Notice:

You will almost certainly agree about the extremes and argue about the middle one. That is where shades of meaning actually live. Nobody needs telling that overjoyed is too big for a bus, but whether a friend's return earns delighted or overjoyed depends on how long they were gone, and that is a judgement rather than a rule.

English has unusually many near neighbours because it borrowed heavily from other languages, so it often kept two words where one would have done.

Loyal and legal come from the same old root, which is about keeping to what you are bound to.

A thesaurus is a book of near neighbours. It will never tell you which one to pick, only what your choices are.

Choosing between near neighbours — Same street, different house — Synonyms live near each other and are not the same address. Grateful and thankful share a street. Excited lives somewhere else entirely.

Describing a friend well — NAME IT - THEN SHOW IT — Give the quality and then the proof. She is honest, and she told the teacher it was her own mistake. One without the other is half a description.

A conversation is shared work

Two friends meet at the gate. If one of them asks all the questions and the other only answers, that is not really a conversation. It is an interview, and it ends the moment the questions run out. Everybody has been on one side of that and knows how it feels.

The rule that fixes it

Answer, then ask. Reply to what was said, and put something of your own back. Two words, and they are the whole difference. It sounds far too simple to matter, and it is the thing that matters most.

Yes and no are stopping words

Some questions can be finished with one syllable. Did you like the film. Are you coming tomorrow. These are closed questions, and each one ends a turn. Nothing is wrong with them. They simply hand nothing over.

Open questions hand something over

What did you think of the film. Why did you choose that one. Now the other person has to build an answer, and building it gives them something to say. That is why an open question feels generous even though it asks for more work.

Both kinds are useful

Closed questions are quick and settle facts. Open ones keep a conversation moving. A talk made only of closed questions feels like a form being filled in.

Start with a greeting

Saying hello first costs a second. Beginning with a demand, however polite, makes the whole exchange feel like business, and people answer accordingly. A single word first changes how everything after it is heard.

When somebody says no

This is where conversations usually die. You suggest the park, and your friend does not want to go. The unhelpful reply is to fall silent.

Ask what they would prefer

The useful reply is a question. What would you rather do. Now the no has become a starting point instead of an ending, and the other person is speaking again.

Now the writing

The second half of this topic is a short paragraph about how a friendship began. Roughly eighty words, with a title.

Three questions first

Before writing anything, answer three things. When did it start. Where were you. How did it happen. Three short notes, and the blank page has gone. Most of the difficulty in writing is starting, and this removes it.

Joining rather than inventing

With those in front of you, writing is a matter of joining them up. That is far easier than starting at the top of an empty page and hoping.

A word limit is a shape

Eighty words sounds like a restriction and works as a help. It will not hold everything, so you have to decide which part actually matters, which is a useful thing to be forced to do. Editors do this to professional writers every day.

What usually gets cut

The general opening is the first thing to go. Friendship is very important in our lives says nothing about your friend and eats ten of your eighty words.

Titles that earn their place

A title should add something. If your first line says you met on a school bus, then calling the piece The School Bus has wasted it.

Name the turning point

Better titles name the moment the story turns on. The Day She Shared Her Umbrella tells a reader something new and makes them want the first sentence. One line, and the reader has already decided to keep going.

Sayings about friendship

Your book ends with quotations, including one about a friend in need being a friend indeed. A saying like that is a whole idea folded into six words, which is the same compression a word limit teaches.

Scenario:

A Class 6 group in Shillong was asked to interview a partner and then write eighty words on how a friendship of theirs began. Tenzin asked his partner nine questions in a row and got nine short answers, and the pair finished four minutes early with almost nothing to write about. His teacher suggested he try answering as well as asking. Meanwhile Bhaskar wrote a lovely opening sentence about friendship being the greatest treasure in life, and then found he had eleven words left for the actual story. Both boys rewrote. Tenzin's second attempt lasted the whole period, and Bhaskar's paragraph began with a torn kite.

Analysis:

One pair ran out of talk and the other ran out of words, and both problems came from the same habit of not choosing what mattered.

Activity:

Interview a partner for five minutes using only open questions, then write eighty words about how one of your own friendships began.

Title:

Two minutes, no yes and no no

What You Notice:

The second round is almost always easier, and the reason is not what people expect. The ban is not really on yes and no, it is on questions that can be answered with them. Once every question is open, the forbidden words stop coming up on their own, because nobody is being handed the chance to use them. Changing what you ask turns out to be easier than watching what you say.

A friend in need is a friend indeed is one of the oldest sayings in English, and versions of it exist in many other languages too.

People remember the first and last things in a conversation far better than the middle, which is why greetings and goodbyes matter more than they seem to.

Editors often say that cutting a piece by a quarter improves it, which is roughly what a word limit does for you automatically.

Keeping a conversation alive — ANSWER - THEN ASK — Reply to what was said, then put a question of your own back. Two words, and it is the difference between a conversation and an interview.

Planning the paragraph — WHEN - WHERE - HOW — Three questions, three short notes, and the paragraph is already half built before you write a full sentence.