Treasure Trove Workbook Answers
The Cold Within
Analysis: Personally , it is my favourite poem in whole treasure trove. The very metaphorical title of ‘The Cold Within’ by James Patrick Kinney suggests the poet’s plea to the humankind to realize the real values of human life that help the mankind to unite in the interest of life. This poem serves to accomplish the agenda of re-awakening the human souls. In fact, this humanity lies hidden under the thick layer of cold selfishness.
Passage - 1
(i) Alliteration is used 'in bleak and bitter cold'. Consonent sound - 'b' is repeated. Adjectives 'bleak and bitter' describe the situation in which the six men were trapped. It was a gloomy, sad , frustrating and hopeless situation.
(ii) There are six human beings referred to in the above extract. They represent the whole human race. They trapped in an atmosphere of bitter cold from which there is no escape. There is a fire to keep them warm. But it is dying. They can keep the fire alive by feeding it with the logs of wood they have.
(iii) The fire is dying but it can be kept burning. All of them had a log each. It was within their power to keep the fire burning and survive. But due to greed, hatred, prejudice they do not part with their logs and perish/die. It was not the cold from outside but it was the cold in their hearts that killed them.
iv) Obviously, the firstmanwasawhiteman. He wasprejudiced against the black man. So out of his racial prejudice, he holds back his log though the fire is dying out. The first man was a white man. Just because of the white colour of his skin, he thought he was superior to the black- skinned man. It was his arrogance. The second man had a narrow outlook. He liked the only people who belonged to his own religion. He was a bigot.
Passage - 2
(i) Tattered clothes means old, worn out clothes. This signifies that the man in tattered clothes was a poor man. He gave his coat a hitch to cover himself more closely and keep himself warm. He wanted to keep what little he had to himself.
(ii) The third man is poor. He finds that one of the group is a rich man. He hates the rich. He thinks they are lazy and never help the poor. So, he too would not give his log to warm a rich man. He keeps his log to himself.
(iii) The rich man thinks that whatever he has, he has earned by dint of hard work. He considered the poor undeserving because they never try to improve their lot. He was not willing to spend his precious log to warm the undeserving
(iv) As the white man has prejudice against the black man, so does the blackman has prejudice against the white man. He thinks the white people have oppressed his race, and it is a chance to take revenge. So, out ofa feeling for revenge the black man does not give his log to feed the fire.
(v) The black man has been oppressed and hated by the White man. Now the black man finds the white man trapped in cold. The blackman has a log of wood. He thinks that by withholding his log he will be able to teach the white man a lesson. So out of hatred for the white man, he does
not part with his log of wood.
Passage - 3
(i) Meaning of forlorn is cheeeless and hopeless. The other meaning is lonely. In this sense, there is a contradiction. A man in a group cannot be lonely. But, though there were six men, they were still alone. They had no truck with each other. In that sense oxymoron is the figure of speech used here.
(ii) The last man's game was give and take. He helped only those who helped him. It was a sort of barter that he practised.He was a selfish man who only thinks of gain. Since no one in the group helped him, so he does not give his stick to help them.
(iii) Human beings are expected to have fellow feeling. They should have warmth and sympathy for each other. But the six men have no warmth of human relations. They suffer from prejudice, bigotry, greed, hate, revenge and selfishness. These are deadly sins that lead to their death
and destruction.
(iv) No doubt the six men are trapped in bleak and bitter cold from which they can have no escape. They were sure to die. But they did not die from the cold weather. There was
a fire that could keep them alive. Though each of them had a stick to keep the fire burning, they withheld their . sticks and died. It was the lack of warmth in their hearts that actually killed them. Their hearts were cold.
(v) Human,race has two options. It can survive if people have love, sympathy and co-operation. We have means to survive even in the most dire situation. Other option is to perish.The human race is sure to perish if people don't have sympathy and love for each other.
