The House of My Childhood Summary and Analysis By Dilip Chitre

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Dilip Chitre was an Indian poet, translator, painter, fiction writer, critic, and filmmaker. He was born in 1938 in Baroda, British India, and died in 2009. He was a bilingual poet and translator and worked both in Marathi and English. Some of his important collections of poems in the English language are given below:

1. As Is, Where Is published in 2007.
2. Postclimatic Love Poem published in 2005
3. No Moon Monday on the river Karha was published in 2000.
4. The mountain was published in 1998.
5. Traveling in a Cage published in 1980

He was famous for translation as well. He has translated Saint Tukaram, Marathi Bhakti poet, and poetry of twelfth-century poet. During his life, he widely traveled to many countries in Europe, Asia, North America, and the inner parts of India. Such traveling experiences help him to write beautiful literary works.

The majority of the poem written by Chitre are lyrical and autobiographical in nature. They highlight the crisis of inner life. Usually, his poems cover themes like life, madness, and death.

The House of My Childhood

Dilip Chitre was an Indian writer, critic, translator, filmmaker, and painter. His Collected Poems was published in the 1990s in three volumes.  Now let us have a look at one of his important poems, 'The house of my childhood'.

'The house of my childhood' is an autobiographical poem where he recalls his own childhood experiences in his ancestral home. Therefore, it is a poem in a nostalgic mood. Childhood memories are very precious for everyone. We always wish to recall good memories of our childhood with grandparents.  Because everyone has a strong emotional bond with their ancestral home. Here in the poem, Dilip Chitre also tries to expose his emotional attachment to his ancestral home. 

After a long time, the poet is coming back to his ancestral home, this is the context of the poem. When he visited the home nobody was there, all the members of the house had moved to cities. All the things, including furniture, were shifted to other places. Only two things are remaining, grandmother's grindstone and brass figurines of her God.  The ancestral home stood on a grey Hill. Grey colour represents gloominess, lack of growth, and destruction. It means that there was nobody to look after and renovate the home. It was on the verge of collapse. Here grindstone represents the traditional life of Indians, which was recently replaced by modern machines. Bronze figurines of God in the house shows that the new generation is not more interested in the religious faith. These two objects also show the personality of the grandmother. She was so religious and used to prepare delicious food for her children and grandchildren using the grinder.

When he visited the ancestral home all birds had disappeared.  Birds used to sing in those days. Now birds are no more, but he can recall or feel songs of birds in those days. The long life in the city never made any difference in his mind. Still, he can feel the presence of all the members of the house in the air. This is not a suitable place for singing a song. Because the words can distribute only the silence because nobody is there to listen to the song.

In the last part, the poet again brings the image of the grandmother.  Now he can feel her presence and voice. He walked steadily around the empty house, like a toddler with the memories of childhood. He can feel the voice of the grandmother, but the pleasant and happy days are gone. Now he can live only with those memories. He says that now he is going to move from the elderly infant life to old age. Whenever we reach old age most of us forget old memories one by one.  Now he lives an elderly man's life with memories of an infant.

A short summary of the poem.

After long years, the poet visits the ancestral home which stands on a grey hilltop. The home is empty now. After the death of a grandmother, everything is shifted to other places including furniture except a grinding stone and brass statues of the God that grandmother worships. It appeared to the poet that even the bird had stopped singing. He recalled how the sky was filled with birds cries in his childhood days. Now the ancestral house is a place of silence nobody can sing there and nobody there to listen. In the last stanza, the poet felt as he could hear his grandmother's voice coming from the branches of a tree. Many summers and springs are gone one by one and everyone left the ancestral home insearching their livelihood.  

Literary devices used in 'The house of my childhood'

Alliteration

Alliteration is a figure of speech in which the same sound repeats in a group of words. There are two figures of speech in the poem.  The first one is "colourless crack". This is an alliteration.  Alliteration is a literary device series of words that begin with the same consonant sound. In the phrase colourless crack, there is a repetition of the same consonant sound "k".

Oxymoron

Another literary device used by the poet, elderly infant.  It is an oxymoron. Oxymoron is a Figure of speech containing words that seem to contradict or oppose each other. Here elderly and Infancy are the two different faces of human life.