Father Returning Home
Dilip Chitre
The poem
My father travels on the late evening train
Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light
Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes
His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat
Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books
Is falling apart. His eyes dimmed by age
fade homeward through the humid monsoon night.
Now I can see him getting off the train
Like a word dropped from a long sentence.
He hurries across the length of the grey platform,
Crosses the railway line, enters the lane,
His chappals are sticky with mud, but he hurries onward.
Home again, I see him drinking weak tea,
Eating a stale chapati, reading a book.
He goes into the toilet to contemplate
Man’s estrangement from a man-made world.
Coming out he trembles at the sink,
The cold water running over his brown hands,
A few droplets cling to the greying hairs on his wrists.
His sullen children have often refused to share
Jokes and secrets with him. He will now go to sleep
Listening to the static on the radio, dreaming
Of his ancestors and grandchildren, thinking
Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.
Theme of the poem
The poet
Tone
Analisis of second stanza
The theme is allienation, because we can understand that he is too distance of her family, and the relationship that he had with his own family. And the other theme is strategment, because the poet father´s fell strange, it is like a sinonim of different of the other persons
The poem has two type of tone, the first is serious, because the poet is describing the type of life that his father had, and the other tone is melancholic because we can understand the pain and the misery of poet father´s when he is in the train and when he is at home too.
The poem has a *twilight atmosphere* because of the colors that appear like *evening train*
Born 17 September 1938
Baroda, Gujarat
Died 10 December 2009 (aged 71)
Pune, Maharashtra, India
Occupation Poet, translator, painter, fiction writer, critic, film maker
Literary movement Indian Modernism postmodernism
Spouse Vijoo Chitre
Children Ashay Chitre
The first stanza describes what the father do when he return home, he drink a cup of tea and a peace of chapati, the he listen to the radio, so in that way he didnt felt alone, then he go to bed, and he dream and think in his ancestors.
Analisis first Stanza
Literary Devices
* I can see him getting of the train like word dropped of a long sentence.*
Metaphor and Similie
The first Stanza tries to describe how his father return home in train after a long day of work, he looks like he is dirty and too tired of been working all the day, the train is silent, qhen he get´s out of the train all the persons look at him, he is too all, this first part of the poem was at night.