Father to Son Questions & Answers | Class 11 English | CBSE NCERT

Correct option: (b). Though they have shared the same house for years, the father knows nothing of his son and does not understand him.

Correct option: (c). Unable to reach the grown son of the present, the father clings to the remembered image of how he was when small.

Correct option: (b). Living together should breed closeness, yet the father knows "nothing" of his son — a son has become a stranger under the same roof.

Correct option: (b). Calling his own son "this child" shows the emotional distance and unfamiliarity that has grown between them.

Correct option: (b). The father confesses his failure openly, with a sense of regret and helplessness rather than anger.

Correct option: (a). Despite knowing nothing of his son, the father is still attempting to construct a bond from the boy's remembered childhood.

Correct option: (b). The father compares raising his son to sowing a seed in land, and wonders why it did not grow according to his design.

Correct option: (a). The seed symbolises all that the father spent or sowed in bringing up his son — his hopes, effort and very being.

Correct option: (c). The father wonders whether his own failures as a parent have destroyed the bond before it could take root.

Correct option: (b). The 'land' — the son's mind and life — is entirely the son's own, beyond the father's possession or control.

Correct option: (a). The extract is built on the sustained image of the father as farmer, sowing the seed of his hopes in the land of his son's life.

Correct option: (b). The father fears either that his effort has been wasted (the seed killed) or that it has grown in a soil that is entirely the son's own.

Correct option: (c). Though father and son live together, they converse only as strangers do — with formality and without intimacy.

Correct option: (b). 'Air' stands for the surrounding atmosphere or environment of the home, which holds no trace of mutual understanding.

Correct option: (a). The son is the father's own physical creation, yet his inner world of tastes and loves is closed to him.

Correct option: (a). "Strangers" conveys that father and son now talk to each other as unrelated people would, without intimacy.

Correct option: (b). The father means the son was shaped to his own pattern — in appearance and inheritance.

Correct option: (b). The father's repeated admission of what he "cannot share" shows his exasperation at the emotional gulf between them.

Correct option: (b). The allusion is to the Biblical parable of the prodigal son, who is welcomed back with love and forgiveness on his return.

Correct option: (b). The father would rather have the son come back to the home he knew than watch him build an independent world of his own.

Correct option: (b). The silence that engulfs them stands for the absence of any exchange or understanding between father and son.

Correct option: (b). The father imagines his present grief becoming the raw material from which a new, patient love would be sculpted.

Correct option: (b). Beneath the anger lies affection — the father is ready to rebuild the relationship the moment the son comes back.

Correct option: (b). The father dreams of his son's return and of shaping a new love, revealing a deep yearning for reconciliation.

Correct option: (b). Bound by blood and circumstance, father and son must co-exist in the same world whether they understand each other or not.

Correct option: (b). After "He speaks:", the son's voice is heard, admitting that he cannot understand why his grief turns into anger.

Correct option: (b). The son's anger is not hatred but the frustrated product of grief — the pain of the broken bond expressed as irritation.

Correct option: (b). Both extend the hand of reconciliation, but it is empty — the longing to forgive is mutual, yet the means to achieve it are absent.

Correct option: (a). Both ache to forgive and be forgiven, yet neither has done anything that can be concretely forgiven, leaving the stalemate.

Correct option: (c). The poem closes with both sides reaching out, so the sorrow is tinged with the possibility — not the certainty — of reconciliation.

The father confesses that despite living with his son in the same house for years, he knows nothing of the boy's mind, likes and inner life. The son's thoughts and choices are a closed book to him. This lack of understanding is the root of the poem's sadness.

Since the father knows nothing of the grown-up son, he tries to build up a relationship from memories of how the son was when he was small. He clings to the image of the loving little child. This backward-looking effort shows how completely the present-day son has become a stranger to him.

The father compares his role in bringing up his son to that of a farmer sowing seed in land. The seed stands for his love, effort and inheritance; the land stands for the son's own mind and life. He doubts whether the seed was killed, or whether it grew in soil that belongs to the son alone.

The line means that although father and son are blood relations sharing one house, their conversation is as cold and formal as talk between strangers. There is no intimacy, affection or openness between them. The line captures the emotional distance that has replaced family closeness.

The father says that even the atmosphere of the home gives no evidence of understanding between them. The word 'air' suggests the surrounding environment of their relationship. It implies total, all-pervading silence and coldness between father and son.

The father admits that his son physically resembles him — made to his design, sharing his features and inheritance. But emotionally and intellectually the boy is wholly different; the things the son loves find no response in the father. Outer likeness cannot bridge inner difference.

The 'prodigal' is the wayward son of the Biblical parable who leaves his father's house, squanders his inheritance, but later returns and is forgiven lovingly. The father in the poem wishes his own son would return home like the prodigal so that he could welcome and forgive him.

The father would rather see the son return to the home he knew than watch him create an independent world of his own. He finds it painful that the son should need a separate identity and life. This shows his possessive inability to accept the son's independence.

The father says he would forgive the son and shape from his sorrow a new love. The present grief and anger would be transformed into a fresh bond between them. The promise of forgiveness shows that beneath the anger the father still deeply loves his son.

The son says he cannot understand himself why his anger grows from grief. He too is hurt by the failure of understanding with his father, and his unexpressed sorrow turns into irritation and silence. The anger is only the outward mask of his inner pain.

In the closing lines both father and son put out an empty hand, longing for something to forgive. The empty hand signifies their mutual desire for forgiveness and reconciliation, and their emptiness — neither has anything real to forgive the other for. The gesture remains incomplete, showing their helplessness.

The poem does not follow a consistent rhyme scheme; it is largely written in blank verse, i.e. unrhymed iambic pentameter. Only a few accidental rhymes occur, such as 'now/know', 'share/air', 'too/knew/new' and 'hand/land'. This freedom suits the conversational, confessional tone of the poem.

The father's helplessness appears in his repeated confessions: he does not understand his own child despite years of living together; he speaks to him like a stranger; he cannot share what the son loves; and he can only wish, like the father of the prodigal, that the boy returns. Even his offer of forgiveness remains an "empty hand" extended in vain.

Though the poem reads like a personal confession of one particular father, the experience is universal. The communication gap between parents and grown-up children, and their silent longing for reconciliation, occurs in families across times and cultures. Hence every reader can recognise the situation.

The line shows that silence, not quarrels, defines their relationship. Father and son have stopped communicating altogether, and this silence is like a wall between them. The alliteration of 's' sounds in "Silence surrounds" deepens the effect, making the hush of the home almost audible.

By calling him "this child" rather than 'my son', the father underlines his sense of distance — the boy seems almost like someone else's child. At the same time the phrase recalls the small child the father once knew and still remembers. It captures the paradox of intimacy and estrangement.

The final lines show both father and son putting out "an empty hand, / Longing for something to forgive". Though neither can actually forgive, both want to. This mutual longing proves that love still survives beneath their silence, leaving hope for eventual reconciliation.

Here the father reports the son's words: the son admits that he cannot understand himself either. Just as the father fails to understand the son, the son too is confused about his own behaviour — why his sorrow turns into anger. The misunderstanding is thus mutual and complete.

The line suggests that father and son are bound to coexist — they share one world, one country and one family, and cannot walk out of each other's lives. Their estrangement is therefore all the more painful, and reconciliation all the more necessary.

The title is apt because the whole poem is the father's anguished address about — and implicitly to — his son: his failure to understand him, his longing for his return and his offer of forgiveness. The simple phrase also hints at the universal line of communication that should run from one generation to the next, but which has here broken down.

The poem depicts the communication gap through the father's own confession. Although father and son have lived "in the same house for years", the father knows "nothing of him". They speak "like strangers", and there is "no sign / Of understanding in the air". The father cannot share what the son loves, even though the boy is "built to my design". Silence surrounds them both. The son, too, says he cannot understand himself, why anger grows from grief. Neither knows how to begin the conversation that might heal them; they can only put out "an empty hand". The poem shows how a parent and child may live side by side and yet inhabit separate emotional worlds.

The father likens raising his son to sowing a seed in soil. He asks himself two painful questions: "have I killed / The seed I spent, or sown it where / The land is his and none of mine?" The 'seed' stands for the love, labour and qualities the father invested in his son; the 'land' stands for the boy's own nature and life. Either the seed is dead — the father's effort has come to nothing — or it has sprouted in soil over which the father has no claim, producing a person he cannot recognise. The metaphor compresses the father's guilt, self-doubt and sense of dispossession into a single farming image, and makes the failure of parenthood feel like a failed harvest.

Silence is the dominant condition of the father-son relationship. It is not the peace of a happy home but a wall built of unsaid words. Because they "speak like strangers", conversation has thinned into formality; because there is "no sign / Of understanding in the air", even the atmosphere is mute. The silence is mutual — the father cannot reach the son's world, and the son keeps his grief locked inside himself until it turns to anger. Yet the poem shows that the silence is not indifference: both sides are "longing for something to forgive". Silence thus becomes the visible form of a love that cannot express itself, and the poem's tragedy is that it remains unbroken.

The father says, "I would have / Him prodigal, returning to / His father's house, the home he knew". The allusion is to the parable in the Bible, in which a younger son abandons his father, wastes his share of the property, and later returns humbled, only to be received by his father with celebration and forgiveness. The allusion is significant on two levels. It reveals the father's secret wish: that whatever the cost, the son should come back to the family fold, where the father "would forgive him too, / Shaping from sorrow a new love". Ironically, it also exposes the father's possessiveness — he would actually prefer a rebellious, wasteful son who returns to a responsible son who builds an independent world of his own.

The father loves his son, but his love is possessive and conditional. He complains that the son is a stranger, yet he also admits his wish to see him as a child again, judging the present boy by "how / He was when small". He would rather have him "prodigal, returning to / His father's house" than see him "make and move / His world" — that is, grow into independence. The consequence of this possessiveness is the very gap he mourns: the son, unable to breathe freely under a father who cannot accept his individuality, withdraws into silence and anger. The poem suggests that love that demands ownership instead of understanding defeats itself.

Paradoxically, the two estranged men are alike in their suffering. Both are failures at communication: the father "cannot understand" the son, and the son "cannot understand" himself. Both suffer in the same way: the father's sorrow is expressed through his longing for the prodigal's return, the son's grief "grows from" anger — each conceals pain behind irritation. Both want the same impossible thing: "We each put out an empty hand, / Longing for something to forgive". The father even says the son is "built to my design", and they must both live "on the same globe and the same land". Their sameness in grief, more than their difference in temperament, makes the poem poignant.

The father's emotions move through several stages. He begins with bewilderment — he does not understand the child he has lived with for years. Then comes guilt and self-questioning, expressed in the seed-and-land metaphor: did he kill the seed he spent? Next is frustrated resignation: they speak like strangers, and what the son loves he cannot share. Silence follows, out of which rises a wistful longing for the son's prodigal return, and a readiness to forgive, "shaping from sorrow a new love". Finally, he arrives at a sober acceptance that both must live on the same globe, and closes with the helpless gesture of the empty hand. His journey is a circle of love unable to express itself.

The central conflict is the clash between the father's possessive expectation and the son's urge for an independent identity. The father wants the son to remain the child he knew — "built to my design" — and to return like the prodigal to "his father's house"; the son, in growing up, chooses to "make and move / His world" of his own. Around this conflict lies a second one: both love and miss each other, yet both are too proud or too inarticulate to bridge the silence. The poem ends unresolved — two empty hands are extended, both "longing for something to forgive", but neither offers the word or gesture that would close the gap. The ending is honest: such gaps heal slowly, if at all.

Forgiveness runs through the poem as a hope rather than an achievement. The father imagines the son's return and promises, "I would forgive him too, / Shaping from sorrow a new love" — forgiveness would be the means of converting grief into a renewed bond. The son's forgiveness is implied in his confessed confusion; his anger is only grief in disguise. Finally, the closing image gathers both of them together: "We each put out an empty hand, / Longing for something to forgive." The poignancy lies in the word 'empty' — each is willing to forgive, yet neither has any real injury to forgive the other for. Jennings suggests that forgiveness is ready and waiting on both sides; what is missing is the courage to speak first.

The poem's imagery is drawn from farming and the Bible. The father speaks of the "seed I spent" and the "land" that is the son's — an agricultural image of parenthood as sowing, which frames the son's growth as a harvest the father cannot own. The allusion to the prodigal gives the relationship the resonance of the parable's lost-and-found pattern. In contrast stand the images of coldness and emptiness: the air with "no sign / Of understanding", the "silence" that "surrounds" them, and the closing "empty hand". Together these images chart the arc of the poem — from the hopeful sowing of a child to the empty-handed longing of two men who cannot reach each other.

The poem presents parenting as an act of sowing whose harvest is uncertain. The father has invested years of life in the son — the "seed I spent" — and even shaped him "to my design", yet he reaps a stranger. His pain has several layers: the bewilderment of not understanding his own child; the guilt of suspecting he killed the seed or sowed it in alien ground; the jealousy of watching the son "make and move / His world" without him; and the grief that hardens into silence. His offer to forgive the returning boy is a final attempt to recover the lost child. The poem shows that a parent's love survives even when understanding dies, and that this love-in-separation is the sharpest pain of all.

The poem is written as a first-person confession, almost an interior monologue, in which the father thinks aloud about his son. The syntax is that of natural speech, with sentences flowing across line-ends ("so try to build / Up a relationship from how / He was when small"). The vocabulary is simple and domestic — house, years, strangers, land — with no ornamental language. The free, unrhymed verse adds to the informal, reflective movement. Even the son's single quoted remark, "I cannot understand / Myself, why anger grows from grief", sounds like overheard speech. This conversational plainness makes the deep theme of family estrangement immediate and believable.

Until this point the poem is entirely the father's perspective; the son is spoken about, never for himself. By allowing the son one sentence, the poet balances the poem and deepens its truth. The son's words show that he is not indifferent or rebellious at heart — he too is perplexed by his own behaviour, and his anger is the disguise of his grief. His admission mirrors the father's opening line, "I do not understand this child": neither understands the other, and the son does not even understand himself. The single line of direct speech thus universalises the mutual failure of understanding and prepares the shared gesture of the empty hands in the final lines.

Both characters in the poem feel love but cannot say it. The father's love appears only as complaint, questioning and wistful wishes — he never addresses a warm word to the son directly; instead he talks about him in the third person, even calling him "this child". The son's love is buried even deeper: it surfaces only as an anguished self-confession, and he cannot explain why his sorrow converts itself into anger. Hence, "Silence surrounds us." The tragedy reaches its climax in the closing image: both "put out an empty hand, / Longing for something to forgive" — a gesture of reaching out that carries nothing, because neither has learnt the language of affection. The poem shows that unexpressed love can be as damaging as no love at all.

The poem teaches that a family bond cannot survive on blood and shared shelter alone; it needs constant communication, understanding and the willingness to accept change. The father loses his son not through any quarrel but through neglect of the son's inner world — by trying to keep him the child he "was when small", he cannot accept the adult who has grown "to my design" yet beyond his design. The lesson is equally addressed to the son: silence and anger only widen the gap, while a single word of reaching out might heal it. The final image of the empty hands suggests that forgiveness and reconciliation are always possible, but someone must make the first move before the hand remains empty forever.

"Father to Son" is a searching study of the generation gap between parents and grown-up children. The father begins with the astonishing admission that he does not understand his own child although they have lived "together now / In the same house for years" and he knows "nothing of him". They speak "like strangers", and there is "no sign / Of understanding in the air". The gap is one of understanding, not of distance: the son is physically "built to my design", yet "what he loves I cannot share". The father's response is to look backwards, to how the son "was when small", instead of accepting the adult he has become. The son mirrors the failure: he cannot understand even himself, why anger grows from grief. Jennings is even-handed: neither is the villain; both are prisoners of silence, extending "an empty hand, / Longing for something to forgive".

The poem makes clear that love between father and son has not died — only the ability to express it. The father's love is visible everywhere: in the years of care implied by the "seed I spent", in his anxious questioning, in his readiness to forgive the prodigal and "shape from sorrow a new love", and in the final outstretched hand. The son's love is equally present though hidden: his anger, he admits, grows from grief, so beneath his coldness lies the pain of a bond he too misses. What has failed is communication. Father and son "speak like strangers"; silence "surrounds" them; the father can only talk about the boy in the third person; the son manages a single frustrated sentence. Their hands stretch out empty — love without a language. The tragedy, Jennings suggests, is seldom absence of love but the silence that lets it starve.

The father's helplessness is revealed layer by layer. His first confession is of ignorance: he does not understand "this child" though they have shared a house for years, and knows "nothing of him". His second is impotence: unable to reach the grown son, he can only rebuild the bond from how the boy "was when small". His third is of guilt mixed with dispossession — the farming metaphor asks whether he "killed / The seed I spent or sown it where / The land is his and none of mine"; either his parenting failed, or it grew into a son he cannot claim. Fourth, he can only wish, not act: he would rather have him "prodigal" returning home than watch him build his own world. Finally, it crystallises in the "empty hand", longing for something to forgive, offered to a son equally unable to respond.

On the surface the poem is intensely personal: a father's first-person confession about his son in their shared house. Yet Elizabeth Jennings turns this private grief into a universal statement. The situation she describes — parents and grown-up children drifting apart under the same roof — recurs in every age and culture. Its details translate into any household: the polite talk of strangers, the silence at the dinner table, the parent who remembers a loving child but cannot accept the independent adult, the child whose frustration turns to anger, and the mutual, unspoken wish to be reconciled. The poem's figures reinforce this universality: the prodigal son allusion is one of the world's most familiar stories of family rupture and return, and the empty hand is a gesture every reader understands. The conversational free verse sounds like any father talking. Readers everywhere see their own homes in it.

The central idea of the poem is that emotional distance can grow between the closest of human beings when understanding and communication die, and that reconciliation demands acceptance of the other's individuality. Father and son have lived together for years, yet are strangers: the father knows "nothing of him" and lives in surrounding silence. The trouble lies in his inability to accept that the small child he remembers has become an adult who must "make and move / His world". His wish for a "prodigal" return shows he wants the old bond restored rather than a new one on the son's terms. The son, equally trapped, turns grief into anger. Yet the ending holds out hope: both extend a hand, "longing for something to forgive". Love persists beneath the silence — it needs only a first word and the courage to love who the son has become.

Jennings writes in plain, conversational blank verse — unrhymed lines with a natural speech rhythm — which suits the confessional intimacy of a father's monologue. Within this plainness she deploys several telling devices. The dominant device is metaphor: parenthood as agriculture — the "seed I spent" sown in a "land" that is the son's own, an image of a failed harvest. There is the Biblical allusion to the "prodigal" son, which deepens the father's longing with the resonance of the parable. Enjambment abounds ("so try to build / Up a relationship from how / He was when small"), the run-on lines enacting the father's hesitant, unfinished thinking. Alliteration ("Silence surrounds us", "make and move") lends the lines a hushed music. Irony pervades the poem: one house yet two worlds, "built to my design" yet unknowable. The final "empty hand" is a symbol at once precise and open-ended.

The poem teaches values essential to every family. First, communication: father and son "speak like strangers" and lose years to silence; love that is not expressed slowly starves. Second, acceptance: the father's real fault is wanting the son to remain the child he "was when small" instead of accepting the adult who must "make and move / His world". Genuine love respects individuality. Third, forgiveness: the father is ready to forgive the prodigal, and both end the poem "longing for something to forgive" — a readiness the poem honours but regrets leaving unspoken. Fourth, empathy: both are so absorbed in their own grief that neither takes the first step. The tragedy can be avoided if parents keep dialogue open as children grow, listen without judging, and let go gracefully; and if children share their world instead of hiding behind anger. One honest conversation could have prevented the poem's quiet heartbreak.