NCERT Solutions for Class 12 English – Flamingo (Poems) Chapter 2 – Keeping Quiet
Poem by Pablo Neruda | NCERT Class 12 English Flamingo
Master the poem with NCERT Solutions for Class 12 English Flamingo Poem Chapter 2 Keeping Quiet, designed to provide clear and accurate answers for every exercise. The poem encourages silence, peace, self-reflection, and harmony among people. Our solutions explain difficult ideas, poetic devices, and the deeper message in an easy-to-understand manner. These Class 12 English Flamingo Chapter 2 Keeping Quiet Solutions are based on the latest CBSE curriculum, helping students strengthen conceptual understanding, improve answer-writing techniques, and perform better in school and board examinations. Check out all subjects NCERT Solutions for class 12 and NCERT solutions for class 12 English prepared by MyClass24 Experts.
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Overview of the Poem
"Keeping Quiet" is a profound philosophical poem by Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel laureate known for poetry that blends the personal with the political and the ecological. Translated from Spanish, the poem is a call to all of humanity to pause — to stop all activity and, in that collective stillness, reconnect with the deeper currents of life. It is a poem about the power of introspection and the dangers of humanity's relentless, often destructive, pace of activity.
Neruda does not advocate for permanent inactivity or death. Rather, he imagines a moment of shared silence as a space for self-examination — a pause long enough to allow human beings to look honestly at what they are doing to themselves and to the world around them.
Summary and Explanation
The poem opens with a specific, almost ritual instruction: count to twelve and keep still. The number twelve recalls the twelve hours on a clock face — a symbolic stop in the ticking of time. Neruda imagines what the world would feel like if, for once, no one spoke any language, no one moved their arms. In this hush, there would be no engines, no wars, no arguments. Just an extraordinary silence.
Neruda then expands this idea outward. Fishermen in the cold sea would stop harming the whales. Those who gather salt would stop damaging their hands in painful, backbreaking work. Those who prepare wars — gathering green weapons, planning destruction — would be forced to put on clean clothes and walk with their brothers in the shade. This is not a small personal silence; it is a civilisational pause.
The poet then addresses what this silence is not. It is not death. It is not idleness. Neruda makes clear that life is distinguished from death by the capacity to do, to move, to choose. He does not want the silence of the grave. He wants the silence of a person who has stopped to look inward, to understand what they truly need versus what they habitually do out of compulsion or fear.
Neruda closes the poem by finding a model for this cycle in nature. The earth, in winter, appears dead — plants wilt, trees shed their leaves, the landscape goes bare. Yet beneath the surface, roots are gathering life, preparing for spring. This is the kind of quiet he wants: not extinction but regeneration.
Poetic Devices and Language
The poem is structured as free verse, with no rhyme or rigid meter. This open form suits the poem's subject: freedom from mechanical constraint. The counting to twelve at the opening is both literally about silence and symbolically about stepping outside the normal rhythm of time. Neruda uses imagery richly — "green wars," "wars with gas, wars with fire" paint violence in vivid, almost elemental colours. The contrast between these images and the proposed stillness creates the poem's emotional tension.
The image of the earth keeping quiet in winter — appearing dead but actually alive at the roots — is one of the poem's most powerful metaphors. It suggests that silence and stillness are not absence of life but a different, deeper mode of living. The fishermen, the salt gatherers, and the arms-makers are concrete human figures that give the poem its grounded, non-abstract quality.
Themes
The dominant theme is the need for collective self-reflection. Neruda sees human civilisation caught in cycles of production, violence, and noise that prevent genuine understanding. The poem also deeply engages with environmental concern — the seas being emptied of whales, the land being scarred by extraction — making it relevant to modern ecological debates. A secondary theme is the relationship between silence and peace, not as opposites of life, but as necessary conditions for a more conscious existence.
NCERT Question Answers for Class 12 English – Flamingo (Poems) Chapter 2 – Keeping Quiet
Q1. What will counting up to twelve and keeping still help us achieve? Counting to twelve gives everyone time to pause simultaneously — a shared interruption of routine. In this brief, universal stillness, the noise of daily life — language, arguments, machines, weapons — would momentarily cease. Neruda suggests that in this pause, we might finally hear something more important than all that noise: our own conscience, our interconnectedness with other human beings, our relationship with the natural world. It is a moment to see what we have been too busy to see.
Q2. What does Neruda mean by 'exotic moment' without rush, without engines? The exotic moment is the rare, almost unimaginable experience of complete collective stillness. Neruda calls it exotic because it is so far removed from the actual pace of modern life that it would feel almost foreign. Without engines, without the rushing of machinery and ambition, human beings might experience a calm that they have forgotten is possible. The moment is extraordinary because it would allow people to be simply present, without agenda or urgency.
Q3. Do you think the poet advocates total inactivity and death? Give reasons. No, Neruda explicitly rejects the idea of total inactivity or death. He states clearly that what he wants is not confusion with total inactivity — life is defined by movement, by doing. He also distinguishes his silence from death. The model he offers is the earth in winter: it appears still and lifeless, yet beneath the surface, roots are gathering energy and preparing for the renewal of spring. He wants a purposeful, regenerative pause, not an end to life.