Keeping Quiet — Class 12 MCQs with Answers

Key concepts: Keeping Quiet (Class 12 English)

Pablo Neruda's poem asks for twelve seconds of stillness across the whole earth — a pause in which fishermen would not harm whales and warmakers would walk about in the shade. The poet is careful to distinguish this stillness from inactivity or death, and takes the earth itself as his proof that quiet can hold life.

Pablo Neruda

The pen name of Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto (1904-1973), born in Parral, Chile. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, and his poems are 'full of easily understood images'.

The proposal

'Now we will count to twelve / and we will all keep still.' Twelve is the count of the clock and of the hours — a complete, familiar measure.

What the stillness means

'let's not speak in any language, / let's stop for one second, / and not move our arms so much' — a pause in speech, action and difference all at once.

An exotic moment

'without rush, without engines, / we would all be together / in a sudden strangeness' — togetherness would feel strange because it is so rarely experienced.

The fishermen and the whales

'Fishermen in the cold sea / would not harm whales' — the first of the poem's concrete gains from a pause: harm suspended.

The man gathering salt

He 'would look at his hurt hands' — the stillness lets a labourer notice his own injury, which constant work prevents.

Those who prepare green wars

'wars with gas, wars with fire, / victory with no survivors' — the phrase names war's futility: a victory with no one left to enjoy it.

Clean clothes and shade

The warmakers 'would put on clean clothes / and walk about with their brothers / in the shade, doing nothing' — the enemy becomes a brother the moment the activity stops.

NOT total inactivity

'What I want should not be confused / with total inactivity. / Life is what it is about; / I want no truck with death.' The glossary defines 'to have no truck with' as to refuse to associate or deal with.

The single-mindedness

'If we were not so single-minded / about keeping our lives moving' — the poem's diagnosis is restless activity for its own sake.

The huge silence

It 'might interrupt this sadness / of never understanding ourselves / and of threatening ourselves with death' — the sadness is self-ignorance and self-destruction.

The Earth's lesson

'Perhaps the Earth can teach us / as when everything seems dead / and later proves to be alive.' Seeds and winter fields look lifeless and are not — stillness is not death.