
Being thankful can bring up many topics in today’s world, and if you were to ask someone what are you thankful for? Well they would probably reply with “my family.” Family is one of the greatest things in the world. The two poems “Those Winter Sundays” and “Forgiving my Father” both show how children don’t exactly appreciate how their parents are, as in how they show their love for their kids. 

Oftentimes we look back on our lives and see regret, we also hear “if we had known then what we know now, we could have made things different.” Growing older we see the world differently, we also mature with time and experience gives us lessons that we can’t ignore. In Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” the speaker is a man who is reflecting on his apathy for his father in the past. As an adult the speaker realizes what he didn’t understand when he was just a young boy. The title of the poem is very appropriate due to the fact of that it was a memory of his childhood hence the title “Those Winter Sundays.”  “In the opening stanza the speaker introduces his father. From the first line his devotion to the child is implied by the fact that even on Sundays he worked on behalf of his son: "Sundays too my father got up early" (1). Significantly, Hayden uses the word "father" instead of Papa, Daddy or Dad, father being a more formal, less affectionate term than those. This word choice reflects the coldness of their relationship” (Those Winter Sundays). In the next couple of lines of the poem the speaker tells how hard his father works and tells of the difficulty of his life “and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached, from labor in the weekday weather made, banked fires blaze.” In the second stanza of the poem the speaker talks about his feelings and the view of his life towards his father and his home, “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,” when the speaker talks about the house he talks about the people inside the house and not the house itself. As the poem continues into the last stanza the speaker changes the tone to a regretful sense and a reader can now see that the speaker did not appreciate the things his father did for him as he was younger. The next stanza says “Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?” as you can see the speaker confesses how he feels now as an adult compared to how he felt when he was a child. “Hayden repeats the question "What did I know?" in Line 13. In doing so, he allows the reader to acknowledge the terrible sense of sadness and regret the speaker now feels. The poem’s final line completes the question: "what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?”” (Those Winter Sundays). The poem throughout its entirety shows of how an older, more mature individual.

“Forgiving my Father” by Lucille Clifton is a poem which begins with “it is Friday. We have come to the paying of the bills.” This line makes the speaker remember her father, “all week you have stood in my dreams like a ghost,” signifying that her father is deceased. These memories of her father are aspects of her life that he impacted most and it is what she uses to judge him on. It is obvious that the daughter still has a hard time with this because her words are harsh and unforgiving stating, “there is no time for you. There will never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher old liar.” Seeing that her father is deceased this would not be a very appropriate statement if they were in good standing. She doesn’t only dislike her father but she blames her father for her and her mom’s struggle. The daughter states that, ”I wish you were rich so I could take it all and give the lady what she is due” this confirming that the daughter is angry and wants to be able to help her mother out. If the father had been rich or been able to pay his dues the speaker believes that their problems would have gone away or been nonexistent. Later in life the daughter realizes that her father had tried to give her all that he had. It just so happens that the father had nothing more to give. “She understands that he did what he all he could do, “you gave her all you had which was nothing. you have already given her all you had.” This is a harsh statement to make, but it is harsh only in its reality, in other words, the daughter does not mean to be biting and scathing with this statement, she just realizes the harsh reality” (New Criticism Essay).  At the end of the poem the daughter forgives her father but not the situation, “you lie side by side I debtor’s boxes and no accounting will open them up.”

These two poems both relate by the speakers being the kids growing up and realizing what they had isn’t really their fathers neglecting or not loving them, it’s their fathers showing them love but not in a way that they could see it. Respecting your family is one of the greatest challenges in life, little things can change your attitude towards them creating issues within. As you saw in these two poems the kids didn’t quite understand what was going on when their dads couldn’t quite give them the love that they wanted. However, the love was there it was just given in other ways such as waking up early every morning and polishing his son’s shoes and warming the house. 
