Poets often use their prose to explore the deeper meanings in life.  Their elegant arrangement of words can also be used to reflect back on one's life in search of a deeper meaning.  The poets Robert Hayden and Lucille Clifton have a similar life story and use their poetic experience to reflect back on their lives.  Robert Hayden's poem "Those Winter Sundays" reflects on his childhood relationship with his father. Lucille Clifton does the same thing in her poem "forgiving my father."  While the two poets explore the same subject, they come to very different conclusions and present their findings in very different ways.

Both poems take the time to look back on their childhood and reflect on a specific part of their childhood, more specifically their relationship with their father. The two poets choose to tell a story of their father on a specific day of the week.  In "Those Winter Sundays", as the title would suggest, Robert Hayden chose to focus on the actions of his father on Sunday mornings. Similarly, in "forgiving my father" Lucille Clifton focuses on her father's actions on a Friday. The two poets focusing on this specific day of the week makes it easier for the reader to visualize the poem and reflect it back onto their own lives. The reflection of the author on his or her childhood adds a dynamic to the story that would not have been possible otherwise. If the poems were a story of a father as opposed to this reflection the story would not have the same emotional intensity.

While both poets reflect on their childhood relationship with their father, we are presented with two very different relationships. In "Those Winter Sundays" we meet a father that is selfless and giving however in "forgiving my father" we are presented with a father who is selfish and taking.  Hayden looks back on the Sunday mornings when his father would wake up early to warm the house and polish the shoes before everyone else woke up. Sunday is mentioned presumably because that is the father's only day off work but he still gets up early to make "banked fires blaze" (Hayden 5).  Hayden looks back at his father and reflects on how he never thanked his father for all the things he did for him.  Contrarily, in "forgiving my father" Clifton describes a difficult relationship with a father who was never able to pay the bills and who it seems she blames for her mother's death.  The father in this poem is made out to be seen as a villain who cheated, lied and could not provide for his family.  This father is very selfish and takes what he can.  The daughter in the poem, presumably Clifton herself, feels like she needs to provide what she can for her dead mothers sake, and this is not a healthy parent  --  child relationship.  The two very different outcomes of a similar situation makes for an interesting insight into how different childhoods can be, and how even among these differences the two poets still grew to be just that, poets.

The differences in attitude towards the poet's father is also demonstrated in the structure of the poems.  It is very obvious upon first glance of "forgiving my father" that there is no capitalization present in the poem. Even the title lacks capitalization. This lack of capitalization could be used as a tool to demean Clifton's father take away some of his importance.  Capitalization is a grammatical way of showing importance.  The lack of any capitalization makes it seem like her father was unimportant. It shows Clifton's negative feelings toward the father figure. 
In "Those Winter Sundays" the structure is a little less apparent but if you look closely you can see that Hayden's word choice reflects the affection he has for his father. The words in the beginning of the poem when describing the work the father is doing such as "blueblack" , "cracked" and "ached" are all very harsh sounding words that make the work the father is doing seem difficult and unpleasant. As the poem continues, and we begin to see Hayden's feelings toward his father, these harsh words give way to much softer words.  Words such as "polished", "shoes" and "know" appear in the second half of the poem where we begin to see Hayden's feelings.  We know that Hayden felt that he underappreciated his father in his childhood, and his word choice reflects those soft, heartfelt feelings.  The harsh words in the beginning signify that hard work his father did, and the softer words represent the feelings of love and admiration that Hayden now has for his father.  This word choice is very different than what we see in "forgiving my father" where there is absolutely no capitalization.  The different styles of writing reflect the different opinions the two poets had of their father.

Overall the two poems both reflect back on the poets childhood, specifically their relationship with their father.  We see these poets approach their feelings toward their fathers in different way.  "forgiving my father" uses lack of capitalization to demonstrate Lucille Clifton's negative feelings toward her selfish father.  "Those Winter Sundays" uses word choice to demonstrate Robert Hayden's positive feelings toward his selfless father.  The two poems both reflect on their childhood, but they harbor very different feelings.
