The Kite by Harry Behn
Quick answer: The Kite by Harry Behn, the NCERT Class 6 poem, explained: stanza summary, imagery and rhyme notes, the ragged ending and NCERT question answer help.
Every kite has two lives, and Harry Behn's poem in the Class 6 Honeysuckle reader is honest enough to show both. In the first life the kite is new: bright against a blue sky, diving, dipping, snapping its tail, riding the wind like a small ship made of nothing but sail. In the second life the flying is over, the string has lost its argument with a tree, and the same kite hangs there torn and ragged. The poem takes about thirty seconds to read aloud and stages that whole arc without a wasted word.
Behn, an American writer born in 1898, worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood's silent era before turning to poetry for children in the 1940s, and the screen training shows: this poem is a sequence of shots, not statements. Below you will find what happens movement by movement, a close look at how the short lines imitate a kite's tugging flight, the standard NCERT questions handled plainly, and two techniques worth stealing for your own work.
What the poem says, movement by movement
The poem opens with pure delight: an exclamation about how bright a new kite looks against the blue. Then it gets to work describing flight. The kite dives and dips, snaps its tail, and soars like a ship that is nothing but sail, riding over what Behn calls tides of wind. It climbs to the crest of a gust, pulls hard at the string, then seems to rest for a moment as the wind falls away.
The middle of the poem belongs to the flier on the ground. When the string goes slack, you wind it back and run until a fresh breeze fills the kite and sends it up again. Then the opening delight returns, repeated almost word for word, and just when the piece seems to be a simple celebration it turns. Nothing looks more ragged, the ending tells us, than a torn kite flapping on its string from the top of a tree.
How the poem works
The lines are extremely short, most carrying only two stresses, so reading the poem aloud feels like the jerk and tug of a string in your hand. Short lines also bring the rhymes close together, blue chiming with new within a breath, which keeps everything light and quick, exactly the physics of the subject. Behn allows himself a single simile, the ship with only a sail, and it is precise: a ship with no hull and no cargo is all lift and no weight, which is a kite described perfectly.
Verbs do the heavy lifting throughout: dives, dips, snaps, soars, rides, climbs, pulls, rests, flaps. There is barely an adjective in the flying sections because motion, not decoration, is the story. And the repetition of the opening couplet is a quiet trap. Hearing the same bright words a second time, you relax, which is exactly when the final image lands.
The sting in the ending
Hidden inside the refrain is a condition: the kite is bright when it is new, and newness by definition does not last. For many children this poem is a first, gentle meeting with impermanence. The toy that was the best thing in the world in the morning is rubbish in a tree by evening, and the poem refuses to look away from that.
What makes the ending art rather than a lecture is that Behn never draws the moral. He does not say that all things fade or that joy is brief. He shows torn paper flapping in high branches and trusts the reader to feel the difference between that image and the bright one the poem began with. The gap between the two pictures is where the meaning lives.
NCERT question answers, the short way
Questions on this poem tend to test observation: did you actually follow what the kite does? Keep the sequence in your head, new kite, flight, slack string, fresh wind, tree, and the answers assemble themselves.
Why it lasts
Children's verse often flatters its readers by ending happily whether or not the material earns it. Behn respects his audience enough to end on the wreck, and children reward that honesty by remembering the poem. It is also simply accurate, about wind, about string, about the way a kite rests on a falling gust, and accuracy is a form of respect too.
For teachers it is a one-page kit for three devices at once: simile, refrain and rhyme, each used cleanly enough to point at. Few poems this short offer so much teachable machinery while still being fun to read.
What today's poet can steal
First, match your line length to your subject's motion. A kite written in ten-word lines never leaves the ground; a glacier written in two-word lines feels absurd. Behn's two-beat lines are not a style choice, they are the subject's pulse. Try rewriting any poem of yours about movement with every line cut to four words or fewer and watch what happens to its energy.
Second, steal the returning refrain that changes meaning on its second appearance. The words stay identical; the reader has changed. And third, end on the after-image rather than the summary. A wrecked kite in a tree says more about time than any sentence containing the word time ever could.
What poets can take from this
- Memorise the flight sequence in order: new kite, dive and dip, climb, slack string, fresh wind, tree; most questions follow it.
- Name the simile precisely in answers: the kite is compared to a ship with only a sail.
- Use the word contrast in your answer about the ending; examiners look for it.
- When you write about motion, cut your lines short and let verbs, not adjectives, do the work.
- Try a refrain in your next poem, but make sure something has changed by its second appearance.
- End on an image, not an explanation, and trust the reader to feel it.
Try it yourself
Spend ten minutes watching something the wind moves, a flag, a plastic bag, a scrap of paper, then write a poem about it in lines of four words or fewer, ending with what it looks like when the wind stops.
Questions
What is the theme of The Kite by Harry Behn?
The poem celebrates the joy and energy of flying a new kite, then quietly sets that joy against how the same kite ends up: torn and ragged in a tree. So the theme is twofold, the delight of flight and the short life of newness. The contrast between the bright opening and the shabby ending carries the meaning.
Which figures of speech are used in The Kite?
The central device is a simile comparing the kite to a ship with only a sail, extended by the lovely idea of the wind as tides the ship rides on. There are touches of personification, since the kite snaps its tail and seems to rest like a living thing. Repetition is also important: the opening couplet returns later, setting up the final contrast.
What happens to the kite at the end of the poem?
It ends up caught in the top of a tree, torn and flapping uselessly on its string. The poet says nothing looks more ragged than a kite in that state. This ending contrasts sharply with the bright, new kite of the opening and gives the poem its bittersweet note.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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