We would like to think that all children look up to their parents and recognize them as the mentors, protectors and providers that they are supposed to be.  Hopefully, this is both a common and accurate recollection for most people.  Of course, there are times when people might not have such fond memories.  These could be simple and common examples of parents acting as necessary disciplinarians.  Other times, the negative memories might be more severe and, unfortunately, very justified.  The relationships that children have with their parents, and particularly with their fathers, have a meaningful impact on the development and well-being of those children (Rosenberg and Bradford 11).

The two poems that I have selected to compare, Those Winter Days by Robert Hayden and Forgiving My Father by Lucille Clifton, address this post-adolescent reflection of a child’s relationship and memories of his or her father.  Each of these three stanza poems are written in the first person and present the narrators’ views of strong childhood feelings towards their relationships with and memories of their fathers.  The concepts of recollection and perspective are similar between the two poems, but the memories described could not be any more different.  The very positive feelings towards a father expressed by Hayden in Those Winter Days are strikingly different in comparison to the negative memories and sentiments detailed emotionally by Clifton in Forgiving My Father.

Although neither poem is an autobiography, both reflect important family experiences that each author had growing up.  Hayden was adopted as a young child after his parents separated and his mother was unable to care for him.  His adopted parents lived in a very poor section of Detroit.  Although his father was an unskilled laborer, he appreciated Hayden’s interest in poetry and supported him through his childhood (Sanders).  Conversely, Clifton, who like Hayden was African-American, was physically and sexually abused by her father while she was young (Bates).  It seems clear that these diverse paths with their fathers had a meaningful influence on their relationships and how they wrote about them in the poems.  Writing these poems may be viewed as cathartic for the authors, because it allows them to express their emotion through their writing, which is believed to have a healing effect in the event of traumatic experiences (Evans).

There are several themes that flow through each of the two poems, the most notable of which is the reflection of a child after the death of his or her father.  In Forgiving My Father, Clifton writes “…there is no more time for you…” (Clifton 8) to her father, the “…old dead man…” (Clifton 20).  Clifton is very direct in providing the reader with knowledge that her father has passed away.  In contrast, Hayden is much more casual in Those Winter Sundays as it relates to the death of his father.  A reader can infer that his father is no longer alive because of Hayden’s use of tense.  Words such as “I’d,” “he’d” and “would” (Clifton) are used by Hayden to guide the reader to understand that his father is no longer alive.

Another interesting difference between the poems is the person to whom each author is speaking through their writing.  Hayden speaks directly to the reader of the poem.  He describes the situation to allow the reader to understand his feelings about his father.  On the other hand, Clifton ignores the reader and instead talks directly to her dead father as if they are having a conversation.  The reader is simply an observer.  Despite the difference, both are effective styles of telling the authors’ stories.

In each poem, the narrators introduce the idea of a day in the week in the very first line.  For Clifton, she writes “it is friday.  we have come to the paying of the bills” (Clifton 1-2) whereas Hayden writes “Sunday too my father got up early…” (Hayden 1).  The days of the week have nothing in common from a practical standpoint, but the authors both use them as an a tool to establish different themes for their poems.  Clifton’s “friday,” which generally is the end of the work week may relate to the end of the bad relationship that Clifton had with her father now that he is dead.  Also, Friday often represents pay day for hourly workers by their employers.  Clifton and her mother never received “compensation” (i.e., love) from her father.  She states “but today is payday, payday old man” (Clifton 5).  But this will never happen because, as Clifton states regarding her father “you are the pocket that was going to open and come up empty any friday.”  In contrast, Hayden’s Sunday is used to emphasize the commitment that Hayden’s father had for him and his family.  By writing “Sunday too my father got up early…”, Hayden implies that his father worked very hard, probably the other six days of the week, as a laborer (his “…cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather…”) (Hayden 3-4).  Despite this, on Sundays, the day of rest, he woke early to make his home more comfortable for his family.  He showed his love by his actions.

In addition to the similarities of the poems in the first lines, the final lines of each poem offer another area for comparison.  Both authors incorporate questions into the poems that set up a final perspective that they want to offer to the reader.  In Forgiving My Father, Clifton writes “…what am I doing here collecting?” before she concludes that it is indeed too late to ask for or receive forgiveness from her father, because he is “…in debtors’ boxes and no accounting will open them up” (Clifton 21-23).  Similarly, Hayden writes in Those Winter Sundays “What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices” (Hayden 13-14).  With this, Hayden is admitting that he had not been aware of the sacrifices that his father had been making while he was growing up to provide for his family by working hard with little recognition. This is supported further by Hayden’s admission that “No one ever thanked him” (Hayden 5).
