The Quarrel by Eleanor Farjeon
Quick answer: The Quarrel by Eleanor Farjeon explained for Class 6: summary, moral, the right and wrong wordplay at the end, plus clear NCERT question answer help.
Nobody ever remembers how a fight with a sibling starts, and Eleanor Farjeon has the honesty to admit it in her opening move: the speaker quarrelled with her brother and cannot say what it was about. One thing simply led to another. From that shrug of a beginning, the poem tracks a small domestic war, an afternoon poisoned by silence and stubbornness, and then a reconciliation that arrives not through wisdom but through a thump on the back. It sits in the NCERT Class 6 Honeysuckle reader because it is short, funny, true, and carries its moral without once preaching.
Farjeon, born in London in 1881 into a family thick with writers, spent six decades producing verse and stories for children. She wrote the words of the hymn Morning Has Broken, and in 1956 she became the first winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award, often called the little Nobel of children's literature. She understood the miniature dramas of family life better than almost anyone, and this poem is sixteen lines of evidence.
What happens in the poem
The story is simple and complete. Brother and sister fall out over something neither can name. The disagreement snowballs: its start was slight, its end was strong. Each is certain the other is wrong, which is the engine of every quarrel ever held. Positions harden, the siblings stop speaking, and the whole afternoon goes dark with mutual hatred, an image the poem delivers in a single striking line about the afternoon turning black.
Then the turn, and it is physical before it is verbal. The brother suddenly thumps his sister on the back and tells her to come along, since they cannot keep this up all night, adding that he was in the wrong. The quarrel dies on the spot. The poem closes with a flick of wordplay: because he admitted being in the wrong, he was in the right. Peace is restored in less time than the fight took to build.
How the poem works
Farjeon writes in short rhymed lines with the bounce of a skipping rhyme, and the lightness is strategic. A heavy metre would make the quarrel feel tragic; this quick, chiming movement keeps us aware throughout that the fight is slightly ridiculous, the way all forgotten-cause fights are. The rhymes pair off neatly, and the near-comic snap of rhyme against anger is where a lot of the poem's charm lives.
Two craft choices deserve a close look. The only real metaphor in the poem is the blackened afternoon, and it lands hard precisely because everything around it is plain talk; one image in a plain-spoken poem hits harder than ten images in an ornate one. And the reconciliation begins with a gesture, the thump, before a single conciliatory word is spoken. Farjeon knows that children, and most adults, apologise with their bodies first: the shoulder bump, the passed snack, the returned pencil. The dialogue only confirms what the thump already said.
The moral without the sermon
The lesson is easy to state: quarrels usually have trivial causes, someone has to make the first move, and admitting a fault is a form of strength, not defeat. What is harder, and what Farjeon manages, is delivering all that without a single line of instruction. The poem never says forgive one another. It dramatises a forgiveness and lets the closing pun do the moralising: being in the wrong, honestly owned, turns into being in the right.
There is a sly detail worth noticing for a higher-mark answer. The speaker never apologises. Her brother takes the whole blame, and she accepts it happily, though the poem's own account suggests both were stubborn all afternoon. Farjeon leaves that little unfairness sitting quietly in the poem, and readers who spot it understand something true about family peace: it is not always justice, and it does not need to be.
NCERT question answers, the short way
Most exam questions on this poem cover the cause, the escalation, the resolution and the final line. Hold the story's four beats and you can answer anything.
Why it lasts
Every reader has lived this poem. That alone would keep it in textbooks, but Farjeon adds the thing memory clings to: a joke at the exact centre of the meaning. The right and wrong reversal in the final lines is the kind of wordplay a ten-year-old can enjoy and a forty-year-old can still be instructed by. Poems that work at two ages get taught for a hundred years.
It lasts, too, because its psychology is unimprovable. The forgotten cause, the hardening silence, the relief when someone cracks first: nothing about quarrelling has changed since 1881, or since the Iron Age. Farjeon just got there early and said it in sixteen lines.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the gesture-before-speech turn. When you write reconciliation, or love, or grief, let a physical action carry the change before anyone says a word: the thump on the back does more work than the apology that follows it. Bodies are more believable than dialogue, in poems as in life.
And steal the ending that lands on wordplay carrying the theme. A pun in the final line is risky, it can feel cheap, but when the two meanings of the word are the two ideas the poem has been weighing, the click is unbeatable. Write your last line so that one word means both things you have been talking about, and the poem will close like a well-made box.
What poets can take from this
- Remember the four beats for exams: unknown cause, escalation, silent hatred, sudden reconciliation.
- Always explain the final wordplay in your answer; it is the most commonly tested point.
- Use the phrase 'trivial cause' when asked what started the quarrel, since the poem insists nobody remembers.
- In your own poems, show peace-making through a gesture before any spoken apology.
- Keep quarrel poems metrically light; a bouncy rhythm lets the reader see the fight is a little absurd.
- Save your single strongest image for the emotional low point, as Farjeon does with the blackened afternoon.
Try it yourself
Write a short rhymed poem about a quarrel that ends with a physical gesture of peace, a passed plate, a returned pencil, a thump on the back, and give the final line a double meaning.
Questions
What is the moral of The Quarrel by Eleanor Farjeon?
The moral is that quarrels usually spring from trivial, forgettable causes and should not be allowed to drag on. Someone has to take the first step towards peace, and admitting your fault is a sign of strength rather than weakness. The brother who accepts the blame is presented as doing the right thing.
How does the quarrel end in the poem?
The brother suddenly thumps the speaker on the back and says they cannot keep the fight going all night. He then admits that he was in the wrong. That single honest admission dissolves the whole afternoon of anger and the siblings are friends again at once.
What did the brother and sister quarrel about?
The poem deliberately never tells us, because the speaker herself does not know. She says one thing led to another and somehow they fell out. That forgotten cause is part of the point: most quarrels are about nothing worth remembering.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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