Father Returning Home

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.