Question

What activities are dear to little children? Who does the child envy and why in the poem “Vocation”?

Answer 1

Hint: The speaker of the poem is a young, innocent school-going child. Every day he happens to meet the hawker who sells bangles, the gardener who digs the garden with his spade and a watchman who walks the dark and lonely streets the whole night.

Complete answer:
Children by nature love freedom and enjoying life in a fun way. They are too young to predict the consequences of their incautious action. They even love doing adventurous things. In his poem “Vocation,” Tagore has given voice to the natural desires of a child. The little child is pure and innocent.

The child first notices a hawker, selling bangles. He wishes he could spend his entire day on the road shouting, “Bangles, crystal bangles!”. He observes that he has nothing to hurry him, there is no definite route he must take and no fixed time to go back home. Seeing this freedom, the innocent child too wishes to become a hawker one day and enjoy all these things. In the afternoon he saw a gardener working with his spade and staining his clothes with dust and dirt. There is nobody to keep a check on him or to scold him. Seeing this, he too dreams to become a gardener so that nobody could scold him for digging the garden or for spoiling his clothes in dirt. Lastly, the child feels like becoming a watchman because he has the freedom to walk on the street all night.

He notices all these people eagerly around him and wants to enjoy the freedom just like the hawker, the gardener, and the watchman. Hence, he envies them all.

Note: The child found the lives of other people interesting because he was under strict control of his parents. He was not allowed to roam anywhere and even had a fixed time of returning home. Due to all these restrictions, he was frustrated with his life. He thought that the hawker, gardener and watchman were very happy as they could do things that they liked and nobody was there to impose restrictions on them.