Class 7 English Chapter 2: Try Again

A poem that tells a story

Most poems describe a feeling. This one tells a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. There is a setting, a king on the floor of his room. There are two characters. There is a problem, and there is a last line that settles it. That is why we call it a narrative poem.

The king on the floor

Eliza Cook opens with a man who has run out of hope. He is King Bruce of Scotland, so he is not poor and not powerless. He wears a crown. The poet says this early for a reason. If failure can flatten a monarch, rank is not what protects anyone from it.

What he had been trying to do

His project is described only as one great deed, meant to make his people glad. We are never told what it was. That vagueness is useful. Because the goal has no details, any reader can fit their own into the gap, which is how a poem about a medieval king stays about us.

Giving up out loud

He has attempted the thing more than once and failed. Now he lies down in low despair, as grieved as a man can be. After a while he says he will give it all up. Saying it aloud is the point. A decision spoken is harder to take back, which is what makes the rest of the poem a reversal.

Something drops past him

A spider comes down on a thread. The poet calls the thread a silken, filmy clue, which makes it sound almost too fine to be real. Nothing about this is arranged. The spider is going home, not teaching a lesson, and Bruce watches only because the movement interrupted his thinking.

A distance he cannot work out

The web is up near the ceiling. The king looks at the thread, looks at the height, and cannot see how the creature will ever get back. That judgement matters later. He is not being unkind when he doubts the spider. He has genuinely measured the problem and found it too large.

The first climb, and the first fall

It clings and crawls straight upwards with strong endeavour. Then it comes down in a slippery sprawl, and it is as near the ground as it ever was. Notice what the poet does with that line. All the effort has bought nothing. The spider is not a little further on. It is back.

Falling lower than before

It runs up again without pausing to complain. This time it falls even lower, and it lies there dizzy and faint. Things have now got worse rather than better. Any reader who has practised something difficult will recognise that pattern, and the poem refuses to hide it.

Getting up again

Its head grows steady, and off it goes. This attempt is better: half a yard higher. The thread is delicate and the climb tires its feet. Progress has arrived, but it is small, and it arrives only after the worst fall. The order of those events is the argument of the whole poem.

Nine brave attempts

Then the poet stops describing and starts counting. Up and down, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, until nine brave attempts have been counted. Nine is a specific number in a poem that could have said many. It tells us how long this went on, and it sets up the line that follows.

The king writes it off

Bruce says the creature is a foolish thing and will strive no more. His reason is sound. It works hard, and it tumbles every single time. Anyone watching would conclude the same. The poet lets the king say it so that we can hear how sensible giving up sounds.

Once more

The next thing the spider does is climb. That is the hinge of the poem. The attempt after the count is the tenth, not the ninth, and the difference is worth getting right. The spider does not succeed on its last attempt. It succeeds on the one after what looked like its last.

An anxious minute

Now the poet slows everything down. The gap shrinks to a foot, then to inches. Steadily, steadily, the spider gains height, and the poem asks us outright whether it will lose or win. We already know the answer. The tension comes from the pace, not from any real doubt.

Into its own home

A bold little run at the last pinch carries it over. The web is called its native cot, which is a word for a small, plain home. After all the grandeur of kings and crowns, the spider’s goal turns out to be modest. It only ever wanted to get back.

Bravo

The king shouts his praise twice, then says something careful. He offers honour to those who try. Not to those who win. At that moment the spider has won and he has not, so praising effort is the only version of the lesson he can actually use.

Why shouldn’t I

Then he turns it into a question about himself. The spider defied despair and conquered; so why not him? This is the moment the poem exists for. A fact about a spider becomes a question about a man, and the question is one he has to answer by doing something.

The quietest ending

Bruce braces his mind. He attempts the great deed once more, as he had before, and this time he does not fail. There is no celebration and no description of the deed. The poem ends where it has to end, because the only thing that changed was his willingness to try again.

Scenario:

Imran is thirteen. After school he delivers parcels on a bicycle for his uncle’s shop. He is paid for each delivery that is accepted. Eleven times this month a customer has refused the parcel at the door. Usually they had simply changed their mind about the order. Each refusal means a wasted ride and no payment at all. On Friday his uncle hands him a twelfth parcel. The house is at the top of a steep lane. Imran says there is no point in going.

Analysis:

Imran’s reasoning is exactly King Bruce’s, and it is exactly as reasonable. He has evidence: eleven rides, eleven refusals. What the poem adds is a question about what the evidence actually proves. Eleven refusals tell him that this is a bad month, not that the twelfth customer will refuse. The spider’s falls did not make the ceiling any higher. There is a second point too, and it is the practical one. If he goes, he may be paid or he may not. If he does not go, he certainly will not be paid, so refusing to ride removes the only chance he had. That is the narrow claim the poem is really making, and it is stronger than the cheerful version about always succeeding in the end.

Activity:

Keep a tally for one week of something you attempt repeatedly — a shot at a target, a tricky sum, a tune. Record every failure, and the attempt number of your first success. Then write three sentences on what the tally shows that a single successful attempt would not have.

Title:

Count the attempts, as the poet did

Safety:

Throw away from windows, lamps and other people, and use something soft indoors.

What You Notice:

Almost everybody’s first success arrives later than they expected, and almost nobody remembers the number of misses correctly afterwards. That is why the poet wrote nine down. A count is harder to argue with than a memory, and it is the count that makes the spider’s tenth climb mean something.

The poem calls the spider an insect, but spiders are not insects at all. They are arachnids, with eight legs and no antennae, while insects have six legs and three body parts.

Eliza Cook was a nineteenth-century English poet who left school early and taught herself. Poems about ordinary determination made her one of the most widely read writers of her day.

Scotland really does have an old tale about a king and a spider, usually told about Robert the Bruce hiding in a cave. The poet is retelling a story her readers already half knew.

The shape of the poem — D-R-O-P: Despair, Rope, Over and over, Persuaded — Despair is the king on the floor. Rope is the spider arriving on its thread. Over and over is the climbing and falling. Persuaded is Bruce going back to work. Easy to hold because the spider literally drops.

The count of attempts — Nine counted, ten won — The poem counts nine brave attempts and then sends the spider up once more. Nine is the number of failures named. Ten is the climb that reaches the web.

A comparison does work that advice cannot

The poet wants us to keep trying. She could have said so in one stanza. She spends twelve on a spider instead. The reason is that a comparison makes the reader do something. We have to see the likeness ourselves, and what we work out we tend to keep.

What a metaphor is

A metaphor compares two unlike things by saying that one is the other. The fear was a locked door. Fear is not a door and there is no actual door. The sentence states the comparison as a fact and leaves the reader to unpack it.

What a simile is

A simile makes the same comparison, but admits it. The fear was like a locked door. Nothing compared has changed. What has changed is honesty about the comparing, because the word like announces that this is a resemblance and not a fact.

The test that sorts them

Look for like or as doing the comparing. If one of them is, the sentence is a simile. If the comparison is made without a signpost, it is a metaphor. That single question settles almost every example you will meet.

The one place the test misleads

The word as has other jobs. In as he climbed, the sun rose, it means while, and nothing is being compared at all. In as tall as the gate, it is comparing. So ask what the word is doing rather than whether it is present. A word is not a signpost merely by being there.

Which one is stronger

Usually the metaphor. Her voice was like music suggests a resemblance. Her voice was music claims an identity, which is a larger claim and therefore a bolder one. Poets reach for metaphor when they want the comparison to feel true rather than merely apt.

Turning one into the other

Both directions are easy once the comparison is clear. Find the two things being compared and decide whether you are signposting. His courage was a beacon becomes his courage was like a beacon. Remove the signpost and you travel the other way.

The comparison this poem is built on

A spider climbs, falls, and climbs again until it arrives. A king attempts a great deed, fails, and attempts it again until he succeeds. The shapes match exactly. The poet sets them side by side and never once says that Bruce is like the spider.

Why that silence matters

Because a stated comparison can be refused. If the poem had told us that Bruce was like the spider, we could have disagreed. By letting us notice it, the poet gets the agreement before we can object. The device is doing persuasion, not decoration.

Alliteration: making effort audible

Alliteration is the same consonant sound beginning words that sit close together. The spider clings and crawls. It comes down in a slippery sprawl. It defied despair. Each pair makes the mouth repeat a shape, so the effort is something you perform while reading about it.

Repetition, job one: on and on

Bruce had tried and tried. One tried would have told us he attempted it. Saying it twice makes the attempting go on, so we feel the length of the failure rather than being informed of it.

Repetition, job two: slowing down

In the last climb the poet writes steadily, steadily. The repeat holds the moment still. A single steadily would pass in an instant, and the whole point of that stanza is that it must not pass quickly.

Repetition, job three: pulling the eye

Up, up it ran. The repeat has no new information in it at all. What it has is direction. It pushes the reader’s attention upward along with the spider, which is why it would make no sense as down, down.

Naming is not explaining

A common answer says only that the poet uses repetition for emphasis. That is true of every repetition ever written, so it explains nothing. The better answer says what this one achieves. Three repeats, three different effects, as the stanzas above show.

Working out the rhyme scheme

Read only the last word of each line of the first stanza: down, think, crown, sink. Down rhymes with crown and think with sink. Label them in order and you get ABAB. First and third rhyme, second and fourth rhyme.

Bravo, and the smallest part of speech

When the king shouts bravo, he is using an interjection: a word that carries feeling and stands outside the grammar of the sentence. It needs nothing else to be complete. Ouch and alas work the same way.

Why the poet writes 'twas and 'tis

These are contractions of it was and it is. But the exercise asks what they are for, which is a different question. They are there for rhythm. Each saves a syllable, and the line has a beat that the longer form would break.

Scenario:

Nadia writes the match report for her school magazine. Her first draft reads: our goalkeeper was good and the other team were quick. The editor hands it back. He says every sentence is true and none of them makes him see anything. Nadia tries again. This time she writes that the goalkeeper was a wall, and that the other team came through the midfield like water through a crack. The editor accepts both at once. Nadia cannot explain why the second draft works, since she has not added a single new fact about the match.

Analysis:

Nadia has stumbled on what a figure of speech is for. Her first draft used evaluations — good, quick — and an evaluation only reports her opinion. The second draft used comparisons, and a comparison imports something the reader already knows. Everyone knows what a wall does, so a wall carries immovability, flatness and the sense that nothing gets past. Everyone knows how water finds a crack, so it carries speed, pressure and the finding of the one weak point. Note that she has used one of each kind. The goalkeeper was a wall is a metaphor, with no signpost, which is why it feels like a flat statement of fact. Like water through a crack is a simile, signposted, which is why it feels like an observation being offered. Both work, and the difference in how they feel is exactly the difference between the two devices.

Activity:

Take three plain sentences from a report you have written about a real event. Rewrite each one twice, once as a simile and once as a metaphor. Then decide, for each pair, which version you would print and why.

Title:

Hunt the devices in a single stanza

Safety:

None needed. Read aloud quietly if others are working nearby.

What You Notice:

Most stanzas turn out to carry all three devices at once, and the rhyme is the only one you can find with your eyes alone. Alliteration has to be heard, which is why reading silently makes it almost invisible. The repetition question is the hardest, because the honest answer is different every time.

The word metaphor comes from Greek and means to carry across. A metaphor carries the qualities of one thing across to another.

Alliteration was once the main organising sound of English poetry. Old English verse had no rhyme at all; each line was held together by repeated opening consonants instead.

An interjection is the only part of speech that can stand alone as a complete utterance. Bravo, ouch and alas are all whole remarks by themselves.

Telling metaphor from simile — LIKE and AS mean it is a SIMILE — Both signpost words contain nothing in common except their job. If one of them is doing the comparing, the sentence is a simile. With no signpost, the comparison is implied, so it is a metaphor.

What the repeated words do — Tried = on and on, Steadily = slow down, Up = look up — Three repetitions, three jobs. Tried and tried stretches the effort out. Steadily, steadily holds the moment still. Up, up drags the reader’s eye after the spider.

Four words that are not spares

English gives you toil, strive, endeavour and brace. A dictionary will tell you all four are about trying hard, which makes them look interchangeable. They are not. Each was chosen for something the others do not carry, and using the wrong one flattens a sentence.

Toil: the length is the point

To toil is to work very hard, and for a long time. You cannot toil for a minute. That is why it suits the spider so exactly: the poem is about effort that goes on past the point where stopping would be reasonable. Remove the length and the word is wrong.

Strive: effort with a direction

To strive is to try hard at something you are aiming for. There is always a target, which is why the word takes a word after it. You strive for a place, or strive to finish. Toil needs no goal at all. A person can toil all day in a field and arrive nowhere in particular.

Endeavour: the attempt itself

An endeavour is an attempt at something new or difficult, and it is the only one of the four that sits comfortably as a noun. You can make an endeavour. You cannot make a strive. The word names the attempt rather than the labour inside it.

Brace: before, not during

To brace yourself is to get ready for something hard that has not happened yet. The king braces his mind and then goes back to the deed. The bracing is not the work. This is why it is the only one of the four that could never describe the spider in mid-climb.

Opposites from the poem

The poem hands you five pairs: up and down, fast and slow, glad and sad, win and lose, succeed and fail. They are worth collecting because the poem needs both halves of each. A story about persistence cannot be told in the vocabulary of success alone.

Words that measure distance

Some of these are plain. Proximity and vicinity both mean nearness, and remoteness is the state of being far off. Adjacent means next to, with nothing in between. These you could put on a map.

Words that only sound like measurements

Others are figures of speech. A stone’s throw means a short way, but nobody has ever agreed how far, and no stone is involved. Yonder and afar are distance in an old or poetic register. A light year is a real distance, and using it about the walk to school is a joke about scale.

Why the sorting matters

Because choosing one commits you to a tone. The shop is in the vicinity is flat and almost official. The shop is a stone’s throw away is friendly. The shop is yonder belongs in a ballad. All three may describe the same two hundred metres.

The poem’s own measurements

Look at how the climb is measured: a long way up at the start, a half-yard later on, and inch by inch at the end. The units shrink as the spider gets closer. The effect is that the last stretch, which is the shortest, takes the longest to read.

Higher and higher

This one works by accumulation rather than by shrinking. Repeating the comparative makes the gain pile up, so we feel progress without being told any distance at all. Paired with inch by inch, the poem gets both slowness and advance out of four words.

A line built to trip you

The poem has a line about a delicate thread and what the spider had to tread. Say it five or six times quickly. The difficulty is alliteration: the repeated opening sound makes your mouth reset the same way again and again, and that is where the tongue goes wrong.

Make your own

A tongue twister needs one repeated consonant sound and a few words that are nearly, but not quite, the same shape in the mouth. Keep it short. The best ones are no longer than a line, because the trip has to arrive before the speaker has slowed down to be safe.

The story about the ant

Now a different creature. An ant finds a piece of roti too heavy to move. She tries lifting it, pushing it and rolling it, and none of it works. Exhausted, she sits down and cries, which is a long way from the spider’s silent persistence.

What she sees, and what she does

A bird nearby is building a nest, and the wind keeps carrying its twigs away. It keeps going until the nest holds. The ant takes the point and decides to try again. But here the story departs from the poem, and the departure is the whole lesson.

The move the poem never makes

The ant does not simply push harder. She calls the other ants, they form a chain, and together they carry the roti home. Trying again was necessary and it was not sufficient. What finished the job was asking for help, which King Bruce never does and the spider cannot.

Telling it as your own story

The book asks you to narrate a time something kept you going. The spine it gives is worth keeping: say what the challenge was, admit you felt like stopping, name what changed your mind, say what you then did, give the result, and finish with what you took from it.

Writing it down, in order

The letter version needs transition words: to begin with, next, after that, then, finally. They carry no information. What they carry is position, so your reader always knows which step they are on. Take them out and a plan becomes a pile of separate sentences.

Scenario:

A school puts up a notice about a new recycling scheme. It reads: bins are in the vicinity of the gate. Separate paper from plastic. Wash containers. Do not put food waste in either bin. Monitors will check the bins. Three weeks later almost nobody has used them correctly. The teacher who wrote the notice is baffled, because every sentence in it is accurate and the instructions are not difficult. A pupil points out that she cannot tell which thing to do first.

Analysis:

Two separate problems, and both are about word choice rather than content. The first is in the vicinity of the gate. Vicinity is accurate and it is also the flattest, most official way to say near, so it reads as notice-language and slides past the eye. A stone’s throw from the gate or just inside the gate would have been understood, because a reader pictures something. The second problem is the one the pupil named. Five instructions are given with nothing to mark their order, so they arrive as five unrelated facts and the reader has to guess the sequence. Adding transition words fixes it without adding any information: to begin with, wash the containers; next, separate paper from plastic; then put each into the bin just inside the gate. Nothing new has been said. What has been added is position, and position is what turns a list into a procedure.

Activity:

Find a real notice or set of instructions at home or at school that has no transition words in it. Copy it out, then rewrite it with them. Show both versions to someone who has not seen either and ask which they would rather follow.

Title:

Build a tongue twister, then test it on someone

Safety:

None needed. Keep your voice down if others are working nearby.

What You Notice:

The stumble almost never lands where you expect. Most people design the twister around one hard word and then trip on the join between two easy ones, because what tires the mouth is resetting to the same shape, not the difficulty of any single word.

Spiders are not insects. They are arachnids: eight legs, two body parts and no antennae, against an insect’s six legs and three body parts.

A light year measures distance, not time, despite the word year in it. It is how far light travels in a year, which is about nine and a half trillion kilometres.

Tongue twisters are hard because of alliteration. Repeating the same opening consonant makes your mouth reset the same way again and again, and that is where it trips.

The four effort words — TSEB — Toil long, Strive towards, Endeavour at something new, Brace before — Toil carries length. Strive carries a direction. Endeavour carries novelty or difficulty. Brace carries time: it happens before the hard thing, not during it.

Sorting distance words — If you can walk it, it is near — Proximity, vicinity, adjacent and a stone’s throw all pass that test. Remoteness, yonder, afar and a light year do not. The test also exposes the figures of speech, since nobody walks a light year.