An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum

Stephen Spender indeed paints a dismal picture of poverty in his poem ‘An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum’. He describes the children in the slum school as pale and lacking energy. They are malnourished and heir to gnarled diseases. Stephen Spender likens them to the unwanted weeds. The classroom too is dingy, with yellowing…

“So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.” What Stephen Spender wants to convey here is that the world of the slum children is foggy, bleak and gloomy. They do not know anything beyond this world, the slag heap in it, the “narrow street sealed with a lead sky”; it’s a world, which…

Here, in this line, the poet means to say that just as Shakespeare and his work are of no use to the children in slum school, maps too do not depict the world the slum children can relate to i.e., “narrow streets…. far far from rivers, capes…”. Both Shakespeare and maps represent a beautiful world…

The map shows beautiful rivers, mountains and Tyrolese valley. The world depicted in the maps is unknown and unrelatable to the slum children. They live in cramped places. The sky above their head is darkened and foggy due to the factory smoke. They are surrounded by slag heap. The maps just tempt them without giving…

In spite of despair and disease pervading the lives of the slum children, they are not devoid of hope. The little boy at the back of the classroom in “An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum” seems to be full of hope in the future. Despite leading a miserable life, he finds pleasure in a…

In the poem, ‘An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum’, there are several words/ phrases, such as “the paper-seeming boy with rats eyes”, “Skins peeped through by bones”, etc., which show that the slum children are suffering from acute malnutrition.

The sour cream walls of the classroom are decorated with the donated pictures of Shakespeare, buildings with domes, world maps and beautiful Tyrolese valley.