It is very good practice whenever you encounter a word that you
are not sure of the definition, to locate that word in the poem or text you are studying and read
around it, both before and after, to see if there are any contextual clues that you can use to
deduce the meaning of that word. This is a valuable strategy that can be used to increase you
knowledge of vocabulary. Let us see how this word fits in to the poem as a
whole:
He sprang to his
sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,And away they all flew like the
down of a thistle.
We can see that the
reference to "thistle" is in a simile that the author uses to compare the sleigh and the reindeer
to the "down of a thistle." Unfortunately, because this phrase comes as the simile, contextual
clues won't help us a lot, which means we need to look up the word if we are unsure of its
meaning. A thistle is a herbacious plant with a prickly stem and purple
flowers.
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