The Lost Dances of Cranes Questions & Answers

Hi Everyone!! This article will share The Lost Dances of Cranes Questions & Answers.

This poem is written by Juliet Wilson. In my previous posts, I have shared the questions and answers of Gogol’s First Day and Hope Is The Thing With Feathers so, you can check these posts as well.

The Lost Dances of Cranes Questions & Answers

Question 1: Who is being addressed in the poem – who is ‘you’? Are they present or even alive? How can we tell?

Answer: The speaker is addressing the cranes. The word ‘ghosts’ in the second line indicates that they are already dead.

Question 2: What is left of the cranes which is used to dance in the fields? Do the words ‘all that remain’ indicate that a lot remains or that very little remains? What is the condition of what remains?

Answer: ‘Fading crackle of energy’ and ‘some grainy video footage’ are all that is left of the cranes. The words ‘all that remains’ indicates that very little is left of the cranes, and the words ‘fading’ and ‘grainy’ tell us that those remains are in very poor condition.

Question 3: There are two dances mentioned in the first stanza. Which are they? What does each of them represent?

Answer: The two dances refer to the dance of the birds that could once be seen in fields and the dance of urban machines that are used in constructing cities. The birds’ dance represents the beauty of nature while the machines represent the destruction of this beauty.

The Lost Dances of Cranes Questions & Answers

Question 4: The speaker obviously admired the dancing cranes when they lived. Now, the city-dwellers watch documentaries and marvel at the wonders the world once held.

(a) Does this mean that the city-dwellers have the same attitude to the cranes as the speaker?

Answer: Yes, the city-dwellers also appreciate the beauty of nature though it is they who are somewhere responsible for their extinction.

(b) Would the city-dwellers feel deeply sad if the documentaries disappeared in the way the speaker is sad that the cranes are gone?

Answer: Although the city-dwellers marvel at nature, their fascination remains superficial and they do not feel as connected to nature as the speaker because they have not had a first-hand experience with the birds. They may miss the videos but will not be as deeply affected as the speaker.

Question 5: Who views/listens to the poor-quality audio/video material? How do they react to it? Is there a big contrast between their reaction and the speaker’s?

Answer: The people in the new cities watch the videos and marvel at the beauty of the natural world that the cranes inhabited. In contrast, the speaker mourns the loss of the cranes and the rest of the natural world.

Question 6: Choose the correct option:

What do expressions like ‘lost’, ‘empty’ and ‘only ghosts’ indicate?

i. a sense of loss
ii. a sense of changing time
iii. a note of protest

Question 7: Choose two expressions that show us that the speaker is talking about the distant places.

Answer: The two expressions that show us that the speaker is talking about the distant places are- ‘fading crackle’, ‘grainy video footage’; ‘wonders the world once held’.

So, these were The Lost Dances of Cranes Questions & Answers.

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