

“We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.” 

Said by radio preacher Charles R. Swindoll, this quote is especially powerful for those with tragic pasts. Even more powerful is overcoming your past, as writers Lucille Clifton and Robert Hayden have done through their pieces “forgiving my father” and “Those Winter Sundays”, respectively. These writers prove that overcoming your past is not impossible, even for people with the worst backstories. 

Through his poem, “Those Winter Sundays”, Robert Hayden wishes to thank his father because of his ungrateful childhood. His best-known piece, “Those Winter Sundays”, Hayden begins describing his father who on “Sundays too…got up early / and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold” (1-2). Even though his father’s hands were “cracked” and “ached/from labor in the weekday weather” (3), he lit the morning fires throughout the house. This establishes the father as a hardworking man, and makes the statement “No one even thanked him” (5) from the end of the first stanza even more powerful. It seems strange how anyone could be this ungrateful, especially since he had polished Hayden’s shoes as well, but understanding Hayden’s past helps understand the problem. Robert Hayden was adopted, but never officially by his next-door neighbors in a Detroit slum (Moore 57). Though his foster parents were strict fundamentalists, the “chronic angers of [the] house,” (9) the discovery that Hayden had never been officially adopted made him feel insulted and unsure of his identity (Moore 57). The lighting of the fires in the house signify a shift in the sound of the poem, changing from hard consonants and short vowels, to long vowels and soft consonants, as well as signify a warming in Hayden’s mood. The last stanza directly addresses his ungratefulness toward his father, as Hayden “[speaks] indifferently to him/ who had driven out the cold/ and polished [his] good shoes as well” (10-12). The final two sentences “what did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?”(13-14), finally exonerating the hardworking father, making long overdue reparations. In addition, the line “love’s austere and lonely offices” (13) makes reference to Paradise Lost through Eve’s plan to “strive in offices of love” with Adam after being kicked out of Eden (Moore 58, Milton, qtd. by Moore). The term “offices” means “a service or kindness done”, so what Eve means by “offices of love” is to “seek the good of others”, something Hayden’s adoptive father has been doing all this time (OED qtd. by Moore). 

Although completely different in tone, the speaker in Lucille Clifton’s “forgiving my father” overcomes her past. The first stanza begins with the speaker’s absent father asking for more time, to which she harshly responds: “today is payday, payday old man” (5), time to pay a debt to her deceased mother. The second stanza continues the theme of her father’s time running out with “there will / never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher/ old liar (9-10), revealing some repressed feelings the speaker feels toward her father. The floodgates now opened, the speaker continues her tirade against her father, wishing her father “were rich so i could take it all / and give the lady what she was due” (10-11). The dramatic shift in mood comes when the speaker concedes that her father had already given his wife “all he had/which was nothing”, because he was the “son of a needy father, / the father of a needy son” (12-13). The speaker finally lays the matter to rest with the third stanza, saying the problem is not hers, but her parents’, calling them “each other’s bad bargain, not mine” (19). Continuing, the speaker wonders aloud “what am i doing here collecting?” (21), because both her parents are dead and gone, “[lying] side by side in debtors’ boxes/ and no accounting will open them up” (22-23). 

Clifton, like the speaker of the poem and Robert Hayden, experienced poverty in their childhood, a detail highly prevalent in “forgiving my father”; the poem begins saying “it’s payday” (Clifton 5), then the speaker wishing her father were wealthy, so that she could give her mother her due. Ultimately poverty made the family’s life difficult, and is hinted that this is the cause of her mother’s death. Poverty may have driven her father to crime, as the speaker calls her father “old pauper, old prisoner, old dead man” (Clifton 20), or have been a reference to the shackles poverty imposed on them. In either case, poverty killed her father, and still owes, because her parents are buried in “debtor’s boxes” (22) .  

Lucille Clifton’s relationship with her father is a strange one; though the speaker in “forgiving my father” is not exactly Clifton, certain aspects are biographical. At first, Samuel Sayles, Lucille’s father seemed like an upright member of society; he worked difficult jobs whist dealing with disease from working conditions until he lost a leg, in his younger years he would read stories to his children and helped spark Lucille’s passion for writing (Lupton 268). However, this seemingly kind figure, as described by Lucille’s half-sister Elaine was , “a lady’s man with many girlfriends, even when he was married to Thelma (Lucille’s mother)”,  and verbally abused her (Lupton 268). Showing no interest in his wife, Thelma and Samuel slept in separate bedrooms. In Lucille’s youth the paternal incest started, but thankfully never went to rape. Though Clifton originally did not speak of the abuse for fear of betraying her father, she wrote about it in her poetry. One such line from “forgiving my father” is “daddy daddy, old lecher, old liar” (9), showing Clifton’s mixed feelings toward her father; ones of love, and ones of hate. 

 Both characters had fathers showing various levels of responsibility; a hardworking father who woke up “in the blueback cold” (Hayden 2) every morning to stoke the fires, and Clifton’s speaker’s absent father that needs to pay. However, the pasts of these characters alone is not what matters, the focus is placed on how they overcame them. Again, there are similarities when working their pasts: each of them has a change of mind. Clifton’s speaker moves from fast-paced ranting to a admission that her father couldn't provide for her mother because he was “the only son of a needy father, the father of a needy son” (Clifton 12-13), acknowledging that it wasn’t entirely her father’s fault. For Hayden, it is the son who is at fault for not thanking his father for the diligence he showed each day, and as a bonus, polishing Hayden’s shoes. Hayden asks “what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices” (Hayden 14), revealing his childhood indifference to his father’s acts of service. Even through troubled pasts, these characters prove that one’s past can be overcome through creative writing. 
