Literature Love

The title is interesting. Notice that it is in the present tense and he is ‘returning’, almost as if he never stops on his journey. This is an early reflection on something I feel the poem shows throughout and that is the hardship of fatherhood and the constant need to provide for your family. The other part of the title to look at closely is the word ‘home’. The connotations of home are numerous, but it is an overwhelming positive word of comfort, warmth, acceptance and belonging. Whatever a home is, it is the one place that we want to be and feel apart of. Thus all his journey and his work that is later described or alluded to in the poem is for one thing: so he can provide a home and develop a home for himself. If you think about how hard life was for grandmother as she brought her family up, in the previous poem in the collection, then you should quickly see parallels here. The father is on the ‘late evening train’, which implies he has worked a long day, a fact that is furth...

Theme:  The poem, Father Returning Home focuses on the theme of alienation or estrangement experienced by the aged in their twilight years. Dilip Chitre talks about his own father and through the poem, we get to know the alienation, isolation and misery experienced by elderly people, especially in cities. Style:  Dilip Chitre’s poetry follows the tradition of dramatic monologue. In the poem Father Returning Home, the poet talks about his father’s loneliness and alienation from the man-made world. He has brought out the emotions of his father, who is isolated from his family as well as from the outside world. He has painted the mundane and fatiguing routine of his father in order to highlight the darkness and misery lurking inside his father’s soul. Imagery in the poem:  The poet uses some fine imagery to describe the lurking loneliness in the man’s soul as he travels in the local train. To convey the ‘twilight atmosphere’ the poet has used a number of descriptive w...

Dilip Purushottam Chitre was one of the foremost Indian writers and critics of the post Independence India. Apart from a being a writer, he was also a painter and a filmmaker. He graduated from the University of Bombay in 1959. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award (1994) for his Marathi book of poems Ekun Kavita. Father Returning Home is a short and appealing poem about an old man in a cosmopolitan city where his own sons and daughters treat him as an alien. He himself is estranged from the man-made world. Through this poem, Chitre has denounced the urban rootlessness and alienation. Stanza 1:  The first stanza of Father Returning Home describes the train journey of his father while returning home one evening. The father stands among commuters in the yellow light of a local compartment. The poet describes his father’s reaction against the sights of the suburbs that pass by. His father remains unmoved by the sights because they are too familiar to him. That is quite normal, isn...