Complete solutions to every question in the NCERT Flamingo textbook, Poetry Chapter 4 “A Roadside Stand” by Robert Frost: Before You Read, Think It Out, Talk About It and Try This Out. Try answering each one yourself first, then check.
1 Before You Read
Q. Have you ever stopped at a roadside stand? What have you observed there?
Answer: This is a personal, opening question meant to connect your own experience to the poem before reading it, so there is no single fixed answer. A good answer describes a small stand you have actually seen, run by people selling a few simple goods (fruit, vegetables, snacks), and notes whether passers-by usually stop, and how the sellers seem to feel while waiting for customers. Connecting this real memory to the poem’s own roadside stand makes Frost’s picture of rural hope and disappointment easier to relate to.
2 Think It Out
Q. The city folk who drove through the countryside hardly paid any heed to the roadside stand or to the people who ran it. If at all they did, it was to complain. Which lines bring this out? What was their complaint about?
Answer: Lines 7-9 bring this out: “The polished traffic passed with a mind ahead, / Or if ever aside a moment, then out of sorts / At having the landscape marred with the artless paint” of the stand’s signs. Their complaint was about the crude signs (“artless paint”, “with N turned wrong and S turned wrong”) spoiling the pretty countryside view, not about the hardship of the people who had put the stand up.
Q. What was the plea of the folk who had put up the roadside stand?
Answer: They were not begging for charity: “It would not be fair to say for a dole of bread.” Their real plea was for a fair share of “the money, the cash, whose flow supports the flower of cities,” the money that keeps cities from “sinking and withering faint”. They hoped this money would let their own narrow lives “expand” and bring them something closer to “the moving-pictures’ promise.”
Q. The government and other social service agencies appear to help the poor rural people, but actually do them no good. Pick out the words and phrases that the poet uses to show their double standards.
Answer: Frost pairs caring-sounding words with predatory ones: “greedy good-doers” and “beneficent beasts of prey” (each phrase contradicts itself), a resettlement the poem calls “bought out and mercifully gathered in,” and an imposed scheme described as “enforcing benefits / That are calculated to soothe them out of their wits.” The final image, “teaching them how to sleep they sleep all day” while it goes on to “Destroy their sleeping at night the ancient way,” shows “help” that leaves people passive by day and robs them of honest rest at night. Each phrase sounds generous, but the wording exposes the harm underneath.
Q. What is the ‘childish longing’ that the poet refers to? Why is it ‘vain’?
Answer: The “childish longing” is the rural sellers’ naive, helplessly hopeful wish that a car will finally stop and buy from them, a wish as simple and trusting as a child’s. It is called “vain” because it never comes true: “the sadness… waits all day in almost open prayer / For the squeal of brakes, the sound of a stopping car,” yet of “the thousand selfish cars that pass,” not even one stops to “inquire what a farmer’s prices are.” Even the cars that do stop turn out to be disappointments, not customers.
Q. Which lines tell us about the insufferable pain that the poet feels at the thought of the plight of the rural poor?
Answer: Lines 32-33: “Sometimes I feel myself I can hardly bear / The thought of so much childish longing in vain.” This pain reaches its sharpest point in lines 47-48: “I can’t help owning the great relief it would be / To put these people at one stroke out of their pain,” where the poet confesses to a thought so strong it almost overwhelms him, that ending the rural poor’s suffering outright would be a great relief. The poem does not endorse this thought; its final two lines turn the same idea back onto the reader, showing how troubling it really is.
3 Talk About It
This is a discussion question, meant to be answered in small groups; the answer below is a model response to guide a written answer.
Q. Discuss in small groups: “The economic well-being of a country depends on a balanced development of the villages and the cities.”
Answer: “A Roadside Stand” can be used to support this statement, from the villages’ side of the imbalance. In the poem, money flows toward cities, “the flower of cities” kept alive by a steady flow of cash, while the countryside is left with a stand that “pathetically pled” for even a small share. The resettlement scheme, which the poem calls “mercifully gathered in”, moves the rural poor closer to “the theatre and the store” and so deepens the imbalance, taking away the independence balanced development should protect. Lasting economic well-being needs villages and cities to support each other as genuine equals, with rural people earning a real “lift of spirit” from their own effort, not from being ignored by cities or having their problems taken out of their hands.
4 Try This Out
Q. You could stop at a dhaba or a roadside eatery on the outskirts of your town or city to see: (1) how many travellers stop there to eat? (2) how many travellers stop for other reasons? (3) how the shopkeepers are treated? (4) the kind of business the shopkeepers do. (5) the kind of life they lead.
Answer: This is an open, personal-observation activity with no single fixed answer; it is meant to be carried out in real life at an actual dhaba or roadside eatery near you. Note down each of the five points honestly: count genuine customers versus people stopping only to use the washroom, ask directions or rest; observe whether travellers are polite or dismissive toward the shopkeepers; and describe the shopkeepers’ daily routine and living conditions as you actually see them. A good answer connects what you observe back to the poem: does the roadside eatery you visit face the same indifference the poem’s stand faces, or is it treated better?
Q. Notice the rhyme scheme. Is it consistent or is there an occasional variance? Does it indicate thought predominating over sound pattern? Notice the stanza divisions. Do you find a shift to a new idea in successive stanzas?
Answer: The poem does rhyme throughout, but NOT in a fixed, repeating pattern such as a regular couplet or ABAB scheme; the rhyming words fall at uneven distances from one another, which is exactly the “occasional variance” this question is pointing to. This can be read as showing thought predominating over sound pattern: Frost lets the sense and length of each sentence control the line, instead of forcing his meaning to fit a strict rhyme. On stanza divisions: the textbook prints the 51 lines in five stanzas of unequal length (lines 1-22, 23-31, 32-41, 42-43 and 44-51; checked on the printed page), and yes, most breaks bring a new idea. Stanza 1 gives the stand’s plea, the traffic’s indifference and the sellers’ hope for “city money”; stanza 2 moves to the satire of the resettlement scheme and the “greedy good-doers”; stanza 3 turns to the poet’s own pain at the “childish longing” and the cars that stop for the wrong reasons; stanza 4 is a two-line flash of the sellers’ crossness over the gallon of gas; and stanza 5 gives the country’s complaint, the poet’s confession and the final turn to “you”. The stanzas are very uneven, and the list of stopping cars even runs across the break after line 41, which again shows thought, not a fixed pattern, shaping the poem.