Father Returning Home

“The Unknown Citizen” by W. H. Auden (1940)

Minus Chitre’s complicated emotional bond to the father, Auden’s poem echoes the sense of how the modern urban world has all but decimated the individuality, personality, and emotional integrity of its residents. Like Auden, Chitre uses the poem to explore modern sociopolitical and economic realities, specifically how the crushing routine of consumer capitalism creates anxiety and despair, and a sense of a life wasted.

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman (1856)

In the surprisingly large genre of commuter poetry, Whitman’s celebration of the idea of commuting, written nearly a century before Chitre’s, captures the idealistic spiritual sensibility lost to Chitre and to his father. The two poems can be juxtaposed as they both recreate a late-day commute of weary city dwellers. Whitman’s poet, however, responds to the communal energy of the commute as a tonic suggestion of the spiritual oneness manifested in the organic sprawl of the modern city.

“Time and Time Again” by A. K. Ramanujan (1966)

A prominent voice in Chitre’s generation of postcolonial Indian poets, Ramanujan uses his grounding in the Hindu religion to offer a much broader concept of time than Chitre offers in his bleak picture of the father locked into his routine.