Similarities and contrast in the themes of the poems
Those Winter Sundays and My Father’s Song
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden is a poem talking about childhood memories of a father. In the poem the speaker remembers his father, and the character of the father. In Simon Ortiz’s My father’s Song, the speaker is narrating the memories they shared with his father. These two poems are written with a focus on the father and child relationship. The two poems also reveal the narrators ' memories and shows how fast time can go and what was meaningful in the narrators’ childhood is gone. The two poems share the themes of Love, Childhood memories, and endeavors of the male parent. Likewise, the two poems contrast like love, reflected by the two fathers, the memories of childhood and the narrator’s feelings about their memories. The two
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In Ortiz’s poem, the narrator appreciates his father. That is why he accompanied him to the field. The narrator is proud of his father and what they do together. Furthermore, there is joy when the two are working together they can take a moment and “scoop tiny pink animals,” (Ortiz, 2003. para. 4). However, the narrator in Hayden’s poem reveal that no one appreciated the father in the last line of the first stanza, he acknowledges that no one ever thanked him. The father of the narrator in Those Winter Sundays is a laborer and probably does odd jobs because he says, “then with cracked hands that ached from labor.” (Out Loud, 2003.para. 1). He seems to be working hard to ensure the narrator got what he needed as a child. In the last stanza where he says, “And polished my good shoes as well,” (Out Loud, 2003.para. 3). The reader is made aware that even though he worked hard probably as a laborer and earned little, he bought shoes for the narrator. The reader can even imagine that the narrator’s father took him to school; that is why he brushed his