Preview
Copywork
About This Passage
This passage is the chapter's threshold, the moment the imagined breaks into the real and Peter himself enters. Barrie compresses the book's mystery into it: Peter is known 'at once,' he is 'very like' the unreachable kiss, and he is 'clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees,' an image at once natural and uncanny. Copying these three sentences trains attention to how Barrie balances the marvellous against the precise, ending on the strange, telling detail of a boy who 'had all his first teeth.'
She started up with a cry, and saw the boy, and somehow she knew at once that he was Peter Pan. If you or I or Wendy had been there we should have seen that he was very like Mrs. Darling’s kiss. He wa...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary of the chapter, then identify the single most important sentence or moment in it. Explain why it matters to the book as a whole and what it reveals about Barrie's larger argument about childhood.
Discussion Questions
- Of all the chapter's images, Barrie lingers longest on the kiss in the corner of Mrs. Darling's mouth, the one no one can reach, and ends by binding Peter to it. Why does this small, strange detail deserve the reader's sustained attention, and what would be lost by reading past it? Use the chapter's details about the kiss and Peter to explain.
- Barrie's narrator insists childhood is a shore 'we shall land no more' and that 'two is the beginning of the end,' yet he narrates Wendy's world with evident delight. What claim about growing up and memory does the chapter advance through this doubled tone of celebration and loss, and why is that claim persuasive or not? Use the chapter's details about Wendy and the narrator to explain.
+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide
Vocabulary
Item 1
Hides or veils something from clear view.
Item 2
Something of little importance or value.
Item 3
Willing to accept behavior or ideas one might not share, without objecting.
+ 3 more vocabulary words in the complete study guide
Critical Thinking
+ 7 more questions in the complete study guide
Get the complete study guide — free
Sign up and get your first book with every chapter included. Copywork, discussion questions, vocabulary, and critical thinking.
Sign up free