Read the poem and answer the questions given below it.
A Letter Never Posted
I wrote it on the night we fought, Imran,
in pencil first, then over it in ink:
three pages on the cricket bat I broke
and blamed on you before I stopped to think.
I said I missed our long walks home from school.
I said the new boy’s jokes were not that bright.
I said that I was sorry. Twice. And then
I struck one out. Two did not seem quite right.
I bought a stamp and wrote your full address.
I left it on my desk to post next day.
Next day you sat beside Vikram in class,
and so I put the envelope away.
Each Diwali, when we cleaned the house, it moved
one drawer down, under bills and broken pens.
Your family left for Pune that December.
I heard it later, from our common friends.
It is still here. The stamp is two rupees,
the flap unstuck, the pages curled at the end.
Last year I found your number in a group.
I typed out “Hi, it’s me,” and did not send.
What does the word “struck” mean in the line “I struck one out. Two did not seem quite right.”?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → removed by drawing a line through it
Here struck means crossed out. To “strike something out” is to draw a line through a written word to remove it.
- The speaker wrote “sorry” twice in the letter.
- Then the speaker “struck one out”, so only one “sorry” was left. Example: The teacher struck out the wrong answer and wrote the right one.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: hit something hard with the hand — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is a real sense of struck, as in “he struck the table”. But a written word cannot be hit out of a letter.
Option 2: stopped work as a protest — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the sense of “the workers struck for higher pay”. The line is about a word in a letter.
Option 3: came suddenly into the mind — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the sense of “an idea struck me”. In the line, the speaker is the one who strikes, and the thing struck is a word.