Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Trilce: 61" by César Vallejo is a poignant exploration of homecoming that transforms into a confrontation with absence and alienation. The poem commences with the speaker's return, "tonight I get down from my horse / by the front door of the house," emphasizing an intimate familiarity. He is not just arriving at any place but at the home "where / I waved goodbye as the rooster crowed." However, the familiarity ends abruptly- "It's locked and no one answers."

The homecoming is presented not as a moment of joyous reunion, but as an unsettling confrontation with absence and silence. This absence is physically encapsulated by the "locked" door, and emotionally deepened by the failure of anyone to answer his call. It's as if his very history and origins have conspired to shut him out, declaring his alienation in the most intimate of terms.

The poem carefully employs the family bench as a symbol of connection and memories. On this bench, his "Mama showed / my older brother how to saddle / backs I'd ridden bare / along the roads and fields, village kid." The bench serves as a point of initiation into a simpler world, a world where his mother and older brother are present and active. But this is also the bench where he "left, to yellow in the sun, / my painful childhood." The tension between nostalgia and pain is deeply rooted in this object, encapsulating the complex relationship one often has with their origins.

The animal accompanying the speaker serves as an extension of his own emotional landscape, emphasizing the speaker's isolation. The animal's actions-sneezing, sniffing, stamping, and whinnying-contrast sharply with the inanimate, silent house. This lends a sense of animacy to the scene, albeit an anxious one.

A ray of hope arrives in the thought that "Papa must be praying late, and perhaps / he'll think it's I who've kept him up." This moment of hope, however, is undercut by the absence of any subsequent response. His sisters are imagined to be "buzzing with their fantasies, / simple and bubbling over / with plans for the party coming soon." The juxtaposition between their imagined liveliness and the actual absence of any human interaction adds another layer of complexity to the poem's emotional scope.

The speaker's "heart [is] / an egg about to hatch, past its time," a vivid image encapsulating expectation, vulnerability, and a sense of being out-of-step with one's own life. The closing lines-"Numerous family we left / not long ago, now no one keeps watch, not even a candle / set in the niche for our safe return"-solidify the theme of absence, alienation, and the ultimate impermanence of home.

"I call again, and nothing," serves as a poignant summation of the poem's essence-yearning met with void. The speaker and the animal "begin to sob, and the animal / whinnies, whinnies again." Their collective expressions of sorrow and despair serve as the only responses in a homecoming that has proved to be anything but a reunion.

In "Trilce: 61," Vallejo masterfully unravels the complex weave of homecoming, juxtaposing the past's vivid memories with the stark reality of the present-a silent home, locked doors, and an emotional landscape as desolate as the empty rooms waiting behind them.

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