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Q.(Reference-to-context, poem extract — An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum) What has he inherited?

CBSECBSE Class XII Board 2019Subjective· 1mImportance★★★★★
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The boy with "rat's eyes" has inherited his father's disease—likely tuberculosis or another wasting illness—symbolizing the cycle of poverty, ill-health, and despair that traps slum children across generations.

Stephen Spender's poem paints a devastating portrait of inequality by contrasting the promise of education with the grim reality of slum life. The inheritance question cuts to the heart of what these children receive from their parents: not opportunity or hope, but the material and biological consequences of deprivation.

The specific boy Spender describes sits "at a sweet father's gnarled disease." The word "inherited" here operates on two levels—the literal and the symbolic—and both matter.

What the inheritance means

Literally, the boy has inherited his father's physical disease. The "gnarled" body suggests a chronic, debilitating illness—tuberculosis was rampant in early 20th-century slums, passed easily in cramped, unsanitary conditions. The boy's "rat's eyes" and stunted frame echo his father's condition; the sickness has moved from one generation to the next, written into the child's body before he had any choice.

Symbolically, he has inherited the entire architecture of poverty: malnutrition, lack of medical care, a future as constrained as the "slag heap" visible from the classroom window. Where children in other classrooms inherit books, security, and the freedom to dream, this boy inherits only suffering. The "gnarled disease" becomes a metaphor for a social system that twists and deforms lives, generation after generation. …

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