Father Returning Home

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

The poem is set in free verse. When contemporary poets use free verse, it is most often a way to use language to free poetry, to make it flexible and supple, to capture in the form of poetry itself the openness and fluidity that defines the creative and joyous life. Here, however, the form and meter deliberately lack the dazzle of clever wordplay or the surprising cadences of shifting and jarring rhythms typical of free verse. Chitre chooses to domesticate free verse. He uses free verse itself to capture the father’s anything-but-free life, capturing in poetic form and meter the ennui, tedium, boredom, and sameness of the father’s days.

Although there are some deviations here and there, the lines themselves do not vary in length. They are, for the most part, the same duration. There is neither a predictable pattern of rhythmic beats nor any pattern of end-rhymes to create the conventional music of poetic expression. There is a dullness, a sameness to the form and meter of the poem. There is not even the quiet surprise of stanza breaks.

In recitation, the poem free-floats line to line in an uninflected and undramatic monotone. To enhance that sense of endless motion-without-progress, the poem uses enjambment, a poetic device in which one line moves into the next without any end-line punctuation such as a comma, semi-colon, or period. Thus, line to line the poem offers few breaks, no respites, and no dramatic pauses. Like the days of the father’s life themselves, the lines move on and on and on.

Manipulation of Letter Sounds

Chitre does not choose to shape the poem’s sonic effect using the familiar poetic device of rhyming. Rather within each line, Chitre creates a subtle aural impact using the sounds of certain vowels and consonants. To enhance the poem’s theme about the dreariness and sameness of the father’s life and how the father sleepwalks through his days shuttling from the city to home back to the city and then back home, Chitre manipulates three sounds that, together, create the somnambulic feel of the poem.

Most prominently, he uses the soft sibilant “s” sound, the slow hiss that suggests the quiet silence of sleep. Read aloud, the lines compel a slow recitation, underscoring the sound’s hypnotic effect. “Standing along silent commuters in the yellow light / Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes” (Lines 2-3), and “A few droplets cling to the greying hairs on his wrists” (Line 19) are two strong examples of the poem’s manipulation of the “s” sound.

Chitre also uses the lingering sound of “l” to give the poem a hypnotic droning feel. Words such as “falling” (Line 6), “like” (Line 9), “long” (Line 9), “length” (Line 10), “sullen” (Line 20), and “will” (Line 21) give lines a low-level humming sound that likewise forces the recitation to slow.

Most generously, Chitre uses the long and liquid-y sound of soft vowels, particularly the long “e” and long “a.” These rich lingering vowel sounds create the poem’s zombie-like tone.

This use of these particular vowel and consonant sounds gives the poem’s recitation a slow, dream-like feel appropriate to a father who seeks the refuge of his dreams to escape, even temporarily, the soft prison of his day-to-day routine.

Visual Language

“Father Returning Home” is a careful composition of four striking pictorials, like verbal paintings: 1) the father at the commuter station; 2) the father having his dinner; 3) the father in the bathroom; and finally, 4) the father in bed. In fact, those moments could function as titles of paintings.

Appropriate to a poem written in an effort to understand the emotional impact of a father, “Father Returning Home” reflects what Chitre most valued from his experiences growing up with his father. His father was a printer by trade but a book lover by avocation. In Vadodara, Chitre would accompany his father to his shop and help mix inks and paints and help set the illustrations and page designs of magazines. He would study the effects of color in paintings and the subtle manipulations of composition in photographs. In addition, at home Chitre’s father surrounded him with handsome and expensive coffee-table books, illustrated world atlases, art books, and museum catalogs, as well as photography books.

From his father, Chitre developed not only an appreciation of the verbal elegance of the written word but also an understanding of the emotional dimensions possible in what he would later call the “visual language.” Chitre was a career painter who explored in experimental expressionistic canvases his concept of the impact of pictures and their ability—without the context of narratives or backstories—to create, manipulate, and even alter moods.

Thus, the images here are less like poetry and more like storyboards. Chitre uses image details, rich colors, and juxtaposition of objects within a frame to capture the loneliness and existential isolation of the father.