Class 8 English Chapter 14: Magnifying Glass

One object, one poem

The whole poem rests on a single ordinary thing: a magnifying glass held in somebody’s hand. Walter de la Mare never explains what it is or where it came from. He simply turns it on four small things in turn, and lets each one open up. That is the entire plan of the poem.

Magic talk

The speaker says the round glass lets him make magic talk. Magic cannot talk, and a glass cannot make it do so, which means the phrase is personification twice over. It also tells us the speaker’s mood before he shows us anything: he is delighted, and he wants us to be.

A scrap of chalk

The first thing under the glass is a scrap of chalk, and inside it the speaker finds a myriad of shells. Myriad means a very great number. The word is doing the same job the lens is doing, because it makes something tiny sound enormous.

Why the chalk is not a fancy

This is the detail worth knowing. Chalk really did form from the shells of countless tiny sea creatures, so a lens held over a scrap of it really does show shells. The poem’s most magical claim turns out to be the plainest fact in it.

An inch of moss

Next comes an inch of moss, which the glass turns into a forest with flowers and trees. Notice that the poet does not say the moss is like a forest. He says it is one, which makes the comparison a metaphor rather than a simile.

A drop of water

Then a single drop of water, compared with a hive of bees. Here the comparison is a simile, because the poem uses the word like. Two comparisons, two different devices, in the space of four lines.

What the glass actually changes

Nothing at all about the chalk, the moss or the water. Every shell and every stem was there before the lens arrived. What changes is the reach of the eye. The poem is therefore not about a piece of equipment, but about the difference between looking and really looking.

Why that matters for the theme

If the glass created the wonder, the poem would be about a clever instrument. Because the glass only reveals what was already there, the poem becomes about close observation, which is a far larger idea and the one the exercise asks you to name.

Six quatrains

The poem has six stanzas, and each stanza has four lines. A four-line stanza is called a quatrain. Twenty-four lines in all, which is short for the amount of ground it covers, since it travels from a scrap of chalk to the moon.

The rhyme scheme

Written with letters, the pattern is ABCB. That means the second line and the fourth line of each stanza rhyme, while the first and third do not rhyme with anything. Glass and chalk do not rhyme; chalk and talk do.

Why a loose rhyme suits this poem

A tight scheme, where every line rhymed, would make the poem feel organised and finished. ABCB leaves the first and third lines free, so each stanza sounds more like somebody talking as they look, which is exactly what the speaker is doing.

The tone

Wonder and curiosity, not peace and not sadness. The evidence is in the punctuation and in the pace. Each stanza names something ordinary and then cannot wait to say what is inside it, and three lines in the poem end in exclamation marks.

A pattern repeated six times

Every stanza does the same two things in the same order. First it names a small or ordinary object. Then it describes the extraordinary detail the lens reveals. Repeating that shape six times is how the poem makes its argument without ever stating it.

Imagery

The word means the pictures a poem puts in your head. This one works almost entirely through sight: shells, a forest, flowers, trees, a hive. You are never told to feel anything, and you are constantly asked to see.

What the poem does not do

There is no story here, no characters beyond the speaker, and nothing happens. Noticing that is useful, because it tells you where to look for the meaning. In a poem with no events, the meaning has to be in the comparisons.

Walter de la Mare

The poet wrote a great deal for children, and this poem is typical of him. He takes one everyday object, looks at it until it turns strange, and stops before explaining himself. The reader is left holding the glass.

Scenario:

A Class 8 group was asked to count the living things in a spoonful of garden soil. With the naked eye they listed four: two small roots, one ant and one seed. Their teacher then gave them a hand lens that magnified ten times. The same spoonful yielded nineteen separate things, including six mites nobody had seen. One pupil wrote in her report that the lens had put fifteen new creatures into the soil. Her partner crossed that out and wrote something else instead.

Analysis:

The partner was right, and the correction is the poem’s whole argument. The lens did not put anything into the spoonful. All nineteen things were in the soil when it was lifted, and fifteen of them were simply beyond the reach of an unaided eye. That is exactly what happens in the poem. A scrap of chalk already held its shells, and an inch of moss was already a forest. Walter de la Mare is not writing about a clever instrument. He is writing about the difference between looking and really looking, which is why the exercise calls the theme close observation.

Activity:

Write four lines about something you have looked at twice, and saw differently the second time.

Title:

One object, four lines

Safety:

No safety concerns.

What You Notice:

Writing the plain line first is the hard part, and it is also what makes the next three lines land.

Walter de la Mare wrote a great deal for children, and his poems often take one ordinary object and look at it until it turns strange.

Chalk really is made of shells. It formed from the shells of countless tiny sea creatures, so the poem’s first claim is plain fact rather than fancy.

A good hand lens magnifies about ten times. That is enough to show the shells in chalk, and nowhere near enough to reach the moon, which is the poem’s joke in the last stanza.

The four small things — Chalk, moss, water, spider — Shells, a forest, a hive, and a hunter.

The shape of the poem — Six fours, rhyming ABCB — Six quatrains, with the second and fourth lines rhyming.

Lying in wait

The second half of the poem opens with the speaker settling down to watch. He lies in wait, which is what a hunter does, and the thing he is waiting for is a spider doing its ordinary work. That choice of phrase quietly makes the watcher and the watched into two of a kind.

The spider at work

What he sees is the spider producing silk and weaving with it. The poem has the silk coming out under pressure, as if from a nozzle, and names the place it comes from. Those are the spinnerets, the organs at the back of a spider that silk is spun from.

Deft

The word the poem gives the spider is deft, which means quick and skilful, and is usually said of hands. A spider has no hands, so the word is a small act of generosity. It is also the poem’s highest praise, and it is spent on an insect-eater in a corner.

Tigerish

Then the claws, which the poem calls tigerish. That word is not in most dictionaries of common use, and it does not need to be, because you can build it yourself. The suffix -ish added to a noun means like, so tigerish means like a tiger.

Building words with -ish

The same ending makes girlish from girl, boyish from boy and bookish from book. It will not go on any noun at all, which is worth testing: waterish and glassish are not words anyone uses. The poem’s tigerish works because a tiger has a quality to borrow.

Why a tiger, of all animals

Scale is the point. The speaker is looking at something a few millimetres across, and reaches for the largest predator he can think of. The lens has not made the spider bigger, but it has made the comparison available, which is the same trick the chalk and the moss were doing.

The silly flies

The flies come next, and the poem calls them silly. They stumble into the net, which is a clumsy word for a clumsy end. The speaker is on the spider’s side here, and a reader may notice that he is enjoying himself rather more than the flies are.

All those eyes

Then the line that only a lens could produce. The flies turn out to have a great many eyes, and the poem breaks off into an exclamation mark. Nobody sees a fly’s eyes without help, so this is the glass talking rather than the speaker.

The joke inside that line

There is a quiet irony in it. The flies have all those eyes and still walk into a web, while the speaker has two eyes and a piece of glass and sees everything. The poem does not point this out, and it is there.

Three exclamation marks

The poem uses them three times, and all three come in the second half: at the claws, at the eyes, and at the very last line. Each one marks a moment when the lens has just shown something the speaker did not expect. They are the tone made visible.

The claim

The fifth stanza stops describing and starts arguing. No thing is too tiny, the speaker says, for this glass of his to make more marvellous. Marvellous means wonderful or astonishing, and the claim covers everything in the world at once.

And itself surpass

Then the strangest phrase in the poem. The glass will surpass itself, and surpass means to go beyond or to do better than. A thing cannot really outdo itself, so the line is a deliberate exaggeration, and it prepares the reader for the last stanza.

The turn

A turn is the point where a poem changes direction. It comes here. For five stanzas the speaker has looked down at things smaller than his thumbnail. In the sixth he looks up, and the subject becomes the moon.

Eyeing the moon

With lenses like this one, he says, the moon would seem close enough to walk to in an afternoon. It is not an astronomical claim, and he does not pretend it is. The word seem is in the line, and it does a great deal of work.

Why the poem ends there

Because it has nowhere further to go. The poem has moved from a scrap of chalk to a celestial body without changing its subject at all. Both journeys are made by the same instrument, and the same habit of looking carefully.

The last word

It is afternoon, which is an oddly ordinary word to finish a poem about the moon. That is the point. The whole poem makes enormous things domestic and tiny things enormous, and the final word does the job one last time.

What the poem is really arguing

That the difference between an ordinary world and a marvellous one is not the world. It is the quality of the attention brought to it. A scrap of chalk, an inch of moss and the moon are all the same distance away from somebody who will not look.

Scenario:

A school bought one small telescope and put it on the roof. In the first term twenty-two pupils signed up for the astronomy club, and eighteen of them left within a month. The four who stayed kept a notebook. Their first entry records seven minutes spent on Jupiter and forty minutes spent on a crack in the pitch below, which one of them had focused on by accident. By March the notebook held nine pages on the moon and thirty-one pages on things within fifty metres of the school gate.

Analysis:

The notebook has the poem’s shape in it, and runs the poem backwards. Walter de la Mare starts with a scrap of chalk and ends by eyeing the moon. These four started with Jupiter and ended with a crack in a pitch. Both journeys make the same point, which is that the instrument is not the subject. What the four pupils found was the thing the fifth stanza claims: no thing is too tiny for a lens to make more marvellous. The eighteen who left had come for the moon, and the poem would say they had brought the wrong kind of attention.

Activity:

Write four lines about the nearest thing to you that you have never looked at closely.

Title:

Find the turn

Safety:

No safety concerns.

What You Notice:

Most poems turn somewhere, and marking the place is usually easier than explaining the poem.

A spider really does have several spinnerets, and can produce more than one kind of silk from them, which is how a web gets both its sticky threads and its strong ones.

Most house spiders have eight eyes, so the line about all those eyes is another case of the poem being literally accurate.

The suffix -ish is doing two different jobs in English. On a noun it means like, as in tigerish, and on an adjective it means rather, as in greenish.

The spider stanzas, in order — Watch, spin, claws, flies — And each of the last two ends in an exclamation mark.

The last two stanzas — Nothing too small, nothing too far — The claim, and then the leap to the moon.

Five devices, one poem

Everything in this part of the chapter comes out of the same twenty-four lines. Five poetic devices, seven collective nouns built on a phrase the poem uses, six idioms made from one word in it, and the suffix that turned a tiger into an adjective. The poem is short, and it is doing a great deal.

Simile

A comparison that uses like or as. The poem compares a drop of water with a hive of bees, and the word like is sitting there in the line. That word is the whole difference, and it is the only thing you need to check.

Metaphor

A comparison made without like or as. When the poem says an inch of moss is a forest, it does not say the moss resembles one. It says the moss is one, which is a stronger claim and a different device.

One test for both

Look for like or as. If either is there, you have a simile. If neither is, and two unlike things are still being compared, you have a metaphor. That single test settles almost every case you will be asked about.

Alliteration

The same sound repeated at the start of nearby words. Woven web-silk does it with w, three times in two words. Notice that alliteration is about sound and not spelling, so a knife and a night do not alliterate although both begin with n in writing.

Personification

Giving a human quality to something that is not human. The speaker says the round glass lets him make magic talk. Magic is not a person and cannot speak, so the phrase does it twice over: once to the magic, and once to the glass.

Imagery

This means the pictures a poem puts in a reader’s head. Almost all of this poem’s imagery is visual: shells, a forest, flowers, trees, a hive, claws, eyes, the moon. You are never told what to feel, and you are constantly shown what to see.

Collective nouns

A collective noun names a group of things taken together. The poem supplies one in its third stanza, where a drop of water is likened to a hive of bees. Hive is the collective noun, and bees are what it collects.

Seven to learn

A swarm of locusts. A constellation of stars. A grove of trees. A troupe of dancers. A battalion of soldiers. A fleet of ships. And the poem’s own hive of bees. Most of these are fixed, and a swarm of trees would simply be wrong.

Where they came from

A surprising number were invented at once, in a fifteenth century list of hunting terms. Some of those have been in use ever since. Others have never been used by anybody outside the book they appeared in, which is worth knowing before trusting a long list.

Idioms with eye

An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be worked out from its words. The poem uses the expression eyeing the moon, and the exercise builds on it with six idioms that all turn on the word eye. None of them is about eyesight.

The six, and what they mean

The apple of one’s eye is somebody very precious. In the blink of an eye means very quickly indeed. To keep an eye on something is to watch it closely. To turn a blind eye is to pretend not to notice. To see eye to eye is to agree. And a bird’s-eye view is an overall look from above.

Why idioms are hard

Because the words give nothing away. A learner who knows blind and knows eye still cannot guess that turning a blind eye means pretending not to notice. The only way through is to meet each one and remember it.

The suffix -ish

The poem makes an adjective out of a noun by adding -ish to it, which is how tiger became tigerish. On a noun the suffix means like, so a tigerish claw is a claw like a tiger’s.

Which nouns take it

Girl gives girlish, boy gives boyish and book gives bookish. But glass, water, moon and scrap do not take it, and the test is whether the noun has a quality worth borrowing. A tiger does. A scrap does not.

The other job of -ish

Added to an adjective instead of a noun, the same suffix means rather. Greenish means rather green, and smallish means rather small. One ending, two jobs, and the word it attaches to tells you which job is being done.

Two sounds made the same way

For both the f sound and the v sound, the lower lip just brushes the upper teeth while air escapes through the gap. The difference is vibration. The v sound has it and the f sound does not, which you can feel with a hand at your throat.

Where each sound falls

Both can come at the start, the middle or the end of a word. The poem supplies plenty: forest, flowers and from at the start, deft and afternoon in the middle, itself at the end. For the v sound there is woven and marvellous in the middle, and hive at the end.

Scenario:

A school nature club kept one page for each of four weeks. In week one the members recorded a swarm of locusts over the playing field, and nothing else at all. In week two, with two hand lenses shared between eleven of them, they recorded a hive of bees, a grove of trees and nine separate insects on a single leaf. In week three the lenses were lost, and the page holds four entries. In week four the lenses came back, and the page holds twenty-one. The club secretary wrote at the bottom that the lenses had made the garden richer.

Analysis:

The secretary has made exactly the mistake the poem warns against, and the four pages prove it. Nothing in the garden changed between week three and week four. The insects on the leaf were there when the lenses were lost, and the only thing the lenses altered was how far eleven pairs of eyes could reach. That is the whole argument of the poem, which never claims the glass creates anything. A scrap of chalk already held its shells. The pages also hold three collective nouns worth noting, each one fixed to its own kind of group: a swarm of locusts, a hive of bees, and a grove of trees.

Activity:

Write four lines naming three groups you can see from where you sit, using the right collective noun for each.

Title:

Collect your own groups

Safety:

No safety concerns.

What You Notice:

The ones you guess wrongly are almost always the ones where a sensible word exists and English chose a different one.

Many collective nouns were invented in one book, a fifteenth century list of hunting terms, and a few of the odder ones have never been used by anybody outside it.

A constellation of stars is a group only from where we stand. The stars in one constellation are often nowhere near each other.

The suffix -ish does two jobs. On a noun it means like, as in tigerish, and on an adjective it means rather, as in greenish.

Simile or metaphor — Like or as? Then simile — No like and no as, so it is a metaphor.

The five devices — Simile, metaphor, alliteration, personification, imagery — And every example is in this one poem.