NCERT Solutions Class 12 English Chapter 6 Shadow 2026-27

Concept used. Chapter: A Lecture upon the Shadow. Donne uses the sun's movement as a love image. Before noon, shadows fall before or beside the lovers. After noon, shadows fall the other way and keep lengthening.

1. Before noon, the sun is rising. The lovers' shadows move with them while love is still growing.
2. These early shadows suggest the disguises and careful behaviour of new love.
3. The lovers hide their feelings because they fear what others may see.
4. At noon, the sun is overhead. The shadows shrink under their feet.
5. Noon therefore suggests open clarity, when love has no need for disguise.
6. After noon, the sun declines. New shadows form behind the lovers and grow longer.
7. These later shadows do not merely hide them from others. They blind the lovers themselves.
8. So the second kind of shadow represents failing love, mistrust, and false behaviour between lovers.

Before noon, shadows represent early disguises used to hide love from others. After noon, shadows represent the darker self-deception that appears when love begins to decline.

Concept used. Metaphysical poetry often explains an emotion through a striking physical image. Here, love is light because true love should be clear, direct, and constant. The poet talks about shadows because imperfect love creates concealment.

1. The poem presents ideal love as full, constant light.
2. Light helps us see clearly. In the same way, true love removes doubt and pretence.
3. Yet the lovers are not always in that perfect state.
4. In early love, they create shadows through secrecy and fear of public judgement.
5. In declining love, they create shadows through false action and mutual suspicion.
6. The poet therefore needs shadows to show where love falls short of full light.
7. Without the shadow image, the poem would lose its warning about love's fragility.

The poet talks about shadows because love is not always pure light. Shadows show secrecy at the beginning and self-deception when love declines.

Concept used. A metaphysical conceit joins unlike things through careful reasoning. Donne joins the sun's daily movement with the stages of love. This makes the shadow image central to the poem's argument.

1. The poem begins with a real scene: two lovers walking for three hours.
2. Their shadows first accompany them, then disappear beneath them at noon.
3. Donne turns this physical fact into an emotional idea.
4. Morning shadows suggest new love's disguises and caution.
5. Noon suggests love at its highest point, where everything is reduced to clear truth.
6. Afternoon shadows suggest decline, because they grow longer as light weakens.
7. The same image therefore carries time, love, fear, truth, and decay together.
8. This makes the poem compact but intellectually rich.

The shadow image works as a conceit. It shows that love grows towards clarity, but may decline into longer and more dangerous shadows of deception.

Concept used. The poem is a direct address, or apostrophe, to the beloved. The speaker asks her to stand still and listen to a lesson about love. His message is that their love must remain honest and constant at its noon.

1. The speaker addresses his beloved as Love and asks her to listen.
2. He tells her that early love may need disguises because it is still growing.
3. He then says their love has reached a clear noon-like state.
4. At this point, they should not fall into fresh disguise.
5. If their love begins to decline, they will make new shadows.
6. These shadows will blind them to each other.
7. The speaker therefore warns her to keep love constant, open, and truthful.

The speaker tells his beloved that their love should stay in clear noon-like honesty. If it declines, mutual disguise will blind them both.

Concept used. A title guides interpretation. If the poem were called A Lecture Upon Love, we might expect a direct definition of love. The actual title directs us to the shadow image, so we read love through its signs of concealment and decline.

1. A title about love would make the poem sound like a general love lesson.
2. The title about shadow makes the image of shadow the key to the poem.
3. It prepares us to watch how shadows change during the walk.
4. It also makes us ask what emotional shadows mean.
5. The title keeps attention on the dangers that threaten love.
6. We read the poem as a warning about disguise, blindness, and decay.
7. This makes the poem sharper than a simple praise of love.

The title makes us read the poem through the shadow image. It shifts focus from love in general to the hidden disguises and dangers within love.

Concept used. Language Work: historical spelling. Early modern English spellings often kept a final e that modern English later dropped. Donne's poem has several such spellings.

1. The given examples already include houres, shadowes, Sunne, noone, clearnesse, and behinde.
2. Other clear examples in the poem are doe, blinde, and worke.
3. Their modern forms are do, blind, and work.
4. Apostrophe forms such as produc'd, reduc'd, and attain'd show a different old spelling habit, so they should not be counted as final-e examples here.
5. These forms show that Donne's printed text belongs to an earlier stage of English spelling.

Other examples are doe, blinde, and worke. Their modern forms are do, blind, and work.

Concept used. Language Work: possessive apostrophe. Modern English usually writes the possessive with an apostrophe, as in love's philosophy. Donne's text writes loves philosophy without the apostrophe.

1. In modern English, love's philosophy would mean the philosophy of love.
2. Donne's line prints it as loves philosophy.
3. The missing apostrophe reflects older spelling and punctuation practice.
4. Early printed texts did not always mark possession in the modern way.
5. We should still read the phrase as possessive.
6. So the meaning is the philosophy or lesson of love.

Loves philosophy means love's philosophy, or the philosophy of love. The apostrophe is absent because Donne's period used different spelling and punctuation conventions.

Concept used. Language Work: older spelling and possessive marking. The examples show forms that modern English would spell differently, such as doe, onely, sunnes, and starre.

1. Doe is now written do.
2. Onely is now written only.
3. Parents issue means parents' issue, or the children born to parents.
4. Sunnes means sun's in modern possessive spelling.
5. Starre is now written star.
6. These examples show that vowel spellings, final e, doubled consonants, and apostrophe use were not fixed as they are now.

The modern forms are do, only, parents' issue, the sun's bright star, and star. The examples show older spelling and possessive practice.

Concept used. Language Work: contextual meaning. An adjective may have one broad meaning by itself and a sharper meaning inside a phrase. Donne uses infant and brave in this way.

1. In isolation, infant means very young, newly born, or at an early stage.
2. In infant loves, the phrase means loves that are young and still growing.
3. Such love is tender, unsure, and not yet fully clear.
4. In isolation, brave can mean courageous, bold, or splendid.
5. In brave clearnesse, it means bright, confident, open clarity.
6. The phrase suggests a state where love no longer needs disguise.
7. The two phrases therefore mark a movement from early growth to fearless openness.

Infant alone means very young; infant loves means young, growing love. Brave alone means bold or splendid; brave clearnesse means confident, fearless clarity.