Poetic Devices/Figures of Speech poem Father Returning Home
Father Returning Home
Poetic Devices/Figures of Speech:
My father travels on the late evening train
Answer: 1. Alliteration- Repeat ion of the sound ‘t’.
Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light
Answer: 1. Alliteration- Repeat ion of the sound ‘s’.
Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes
Answer: 1. Alliteration- Repeat ion of the sound ‘s’.
2. Personification- animate qualities are given to- suburbs
3. Transferred Epithet- the epithet ‘unseeing’ transferred from ‘poet’ to his ‘eyes’
His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat
Answer: 1. Metaphor- ‘black raincoat’ has been compared to the bleakness of the rainy day.
Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books Is falling apart.
Answer: 1. Alliteration- Repeat ion of the sound ‘s’.
His eyes dimmed by age
Fade homeward through the humid monsoon night.
Answer: 1. Alliteration- Repeat ion of the sound ‘h’.
2. Transferred Epithet- the epithet ‘humid’ transferred from the weather to ‘night’.
Now I can see him getting off the train
Like a word dropped from a long sentence.
Answer: 1. Simile- father getting of the train is compared to ‘a word dropped from a long sentence’.
He hurries across the length of the grey platform,
Answer: 1. Alliteration- Repeat ion of the sound ‘h’.
2. Metaphor- grey platform compared to the father’s present situation.
- Crosses the railway line, enters the lane,
Answer: 1. Alliteration- Repeat ion of the sound ‘l’.
His chappals are sticky with mud, but he hurries onward.
Answer: 1. Alliteration- Repeat ion of the sound ‘h’.
Home again, I see him drinking weak tea,
Eating a stale chapati, reading a book.
Answer: 1. Synecdoche- ‘chapatti’ represents ‘food’.
He goes into the toilet to contemplate
Man’s estrangement from a man-made world.
Answer: 1. Repetition- ‘man’
The cold water running over his brown hands,
Answer: 1. Transferred Epithet- the epithet ‘brown transferred from the man to his hands.
A few droplets cling to the greying hair on his wrists.
Answer: 1. Synecdoche- ‘greying hair represents the ‘father’s old age’.
His sullen children have often refused to share
Jokes and secrets with him.
Answer: 1. Alliteration- Repeat ion of the sound ‘s’.
Listening to the static on the radio, dreaming
Answer: Onomatopoeia- the word ‘static’ presents the hissing sounds coming from the radio.