Question

“So blot their maps with slums as big as doom,” says Stephen Spender. What does the poet want to convey?

Answer 1

Hint: The poet Stephen Spender, in the poem ‘An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum’, is trying to talk about social injustices and poverty which children of a lower economic background have to face, even in the realms of education. The biases towards their poverty is also reflected in the education imparted to these children.

Complete answer:
The above line “... so blot their maps with slums as big as doom” refer to the negative worldview of the slum children due to the conditions they have been subjected to all their lives. These children wear tattered clothes and old, heavy rusted spectacles. They live in filthy conditions and some have also inherited their parents’ diseases due to unhealthy living conditions.

The world which the children of the slum know is not in the maps or in the pictures of beautiful places which are stuck on their classroom walls. The world which the children know is the squalid condition outside the windows of their classroom from which they see no escape. These children have also been socially outcasted, which means that their appearance and living conditions make them unwanted. They are not given love and acceptance by the outside world and thus develop a negative image of the world.

As such, these children have no hope or dreams in their lives. They despise the world and the people and ultimately resort to criminal activities. They are taught in dark, dinghy classrooms, where no sunlight enters. The education given to them is not of their relevance either. The children don’t relate to education and therefore have no interest in attaining education. Shakespeare to them is a wicked man who says unnecessary things and the maps are fake examples. The authorities and government make no efforts to uplift them from this condition. Rather, they build bigger slums to trap more people in such living conditions,thus “blot their maps with slums as big as doom.”

Note: The attitude held by people who attend good schools against those who are not so fortunate is called discrimination. Discrimination limits our ability to understand those who are different or less fortunate than us because we hold certain previous ideas about them and do not want to correct those ideas. The poet in this poem deals with the key theme of discrimination.