Father Returning Home

Write an essay answering the following question about “Father Returning Home” by Dilip Chitre. (Between 400 and 500 words): Explore the poem showing how the poet conveys his father’s sense of isolation.

In the poem “Father returning home”, Dilip Chitre conveys his father’s sense of isolation making, on one hand, an exhaustive personal and space-time description, of his trip back home from work. On the other hand he depicts his routinary and monotonous domestic life upon arrival, which comes to reinforce that idea. Both descriptions are strongly backed by specific language to help create a bleak atmosphere.

First of all, Chitre locates us both spatially and temporally, by describing his father’s journey from the big city to the outskirts (late evening train / commuters / suburbs) already giving the idea of loneliness through some verbs and adjectives (standing among silent / slide past). Moreover, his unseeing eyes lead us to also think of tiredness -because it is late, but also because he is old. These first three lines place his father in a modern context -the train and suburbs- with little or no communication with others and showing he has no interest or that he is absent from what is happening around him. After that he describes him precisely, emphasizing on his clothes and general appearance which both speak about some slovenliness and lethargy (soggy / stained / falling apart), one of many characteristics of an alienated person. The allusion to the weather in the stanza reinforces it (mud / humid / sticky). The second half of the stanza strengthens this ideas through the description of his actions. There is a contrast between the way he gets down from the train -dropped, with no determination or specific intention- and how he then hurries to leave the station, suggesting he is not part of that world and wants to get away from it quickly.

Immediately afterwards, another contrast reinforces the idea of solitude:

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