Nobody would call the opening of Balachandran V's poem an advertisement for exercise. "Laboured breath, squeaking knees / Crunching pain in the lower back": the body complains in short, graceless phrases, and the "stench of garbage" is added to the list. Yet the poem ends on a "lovely Sunday morning." Its subject is that journey from discomfort to delight, and its central idea is that pleasure on a bicycle comes with the effort and the grime, not after them.
The poem builds this change through its refrain, "Cycling, cycling, cycling," which comes back three times. Said aloud, the three beats sound like pedals turning, and each return pulls the poem forward after a stretch of observation. The line that follows it keeps changing, though. The morning is first "great," then "good," then "lovely." The adjectives don't climb in strength, since "good" is quieter than "great." They seem to soften, moving from a shout of enthusiasm to something gentler and more affectionate. The speaker is settling into the ride, and the poem's mood settles with him.
The poem's physical detail is sharp. The first stanza's trouble is mostly in the body and the nose. Later, the speaker admits he is "sticking up my nose at the bikes and cars," a small joke that picks up the nose from the first stanza. The garbage smell "rides up" his nose, and now he turns that nose up at motorised traffic, with a cyclist's cheerful snobbery. The next line is gentler. Of the "old men on cycles pedaling by," he says, "I could love them, warts and all." The phrase is a little teasing, but it shows a man who has stopped fighting the street and started enjoying its company.
The fourth stanza is where the poem opens out. Five lines end in the same word: "wafting by," "sweeping by," "flying by," "lashing by," "playing by." Free verse has no need of rhyme, and this repeated "by" works as a substitute, a drumbeat that makes the stanza feel like a street scrolling past. The senses also widen here. Earlier the smell was garbage, and now it is "smells of the sea." The sounds arrive from every direction: jets overhead, crows in the air, waves at the shore, children on the ground. The verbs shift from "wafting" to "lashing," from soft to violent, so the stanza feels full of different energies. Notably, the speaker's own effort has dropped out of view. He is no longer listing his aches, because he is absorbed in what passes him.
The ending belongs to sound. The "Klaxon squealing peee-yo peee-yo" and the bell's "ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling" are written as noises, not described, so the reader hears them. The bell is "a-peeling," which is a good pun. It suggests ringing ("pealing"), and it also suggests the bell is appealing. The old-fashioned "a-" prefix gives the line a folk-song bounce. Even the harsh horn and the cheerful bell sit side by side without either one cancelling the other. The poem's pleasure has room for both.
Part of what makes the poem worth reading is how little it pretends. It doesn't hide the pain to make the ride look pleasant, and it doesn't dwell on the pain to seem honest. Both are shown at full volume, and the poem lets the reader decide which wins. The plain vocabulary and repeated words give it the feel of someone talking about their morning, not building an argument. The dateline, "Trivandrum, 09-05-2011," ties it to a particular place and day, which fits a poem that is about noticing what is actually around you. Ordinary things like newspaper boys, crows, and a bicycle bell become worth attention. The poem's quiet claim is that a Sunday morning is lovely partly because the cyclist is awake enough, even with sore knees, to hear all of it.