
The early years in someone’s life are often the most important when it comes to shaping who they are as a person. Everyone has a different relationship with their father depending on their childhood experiences. By looking at “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke and “Forgiving My Father” by Lucille Clifton the reader can clearly see how based on the events occurring during the childhood of both speakers shaped their relationship with their father, and how it affected their relationship with their mother. More specifically, by looking at how the speaker talks about their father throughout the poems we can see different forms of forms of forgiveness, which is important because it gives the reader a deeper understanding of the speaker’s relationship with both of their parents. These relationships are similar in some ways, but they are expressed differently. It is important for the reader to see these relationships and forms of forgiveness and it can be connected to everyone in the world around them because how a person acts toward their parents shows us a lot about their personality. 

The reader can see early on in “My Papa’s Waltz” the speaker cares for his father even though he is not a good father when the boy says “But I hung on like death” (line 3). This is a common relationship that most readers can relate with because people are usually biased toward their parents and look up to them even though sometimes they should not. Simultaneously, the reader can see in the words “like death” that the boy is also afraid to let go and stop the dance. He knows he must hang on and finish the “waltz” with his father, even though it is clearly a rough experience. The speaker in this poem is looking back on a childhood experience and may not have realized the severity of his father’s actions at this time, but he knew they were not good. The young boy clearly has an abusive father, and the reader can see this in the lines reading “The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle” (lines 9-10) and “You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt” (lines 13-14). This shows a constant kind of forgiveness, where the speaker sees past his father’s beatings on a daily basis and continues to show him respect instead of holding a grudge. The boy also has respect for his mother, which the reader can see when he says “My mother’s countenance Could not unfrown itself” (lines 7-8). He clearly recognizes that his mother is not happy with this waltzing and does not want to upset his mother, but he does not stop the waltzing to please his father. More simply, the boy respects both of his parents, but he respects his father more. 

In contrast to this constant forgiveness we see from the little boy in “My Papa’s Waltz,” the speaker in “Forgiving My Father” excuses her father for their rough relationship in a different way. We can see from her choice of words that the speaker is much more concerned with monetary payment for her losses than an apology from her father. She uses words throughout the poem such as “bills,” “payday,” and “rich,” so the reader can see she does not have a close relationship with her father seeing as she just wants his money instead of a better bond. It is clear to the reader the young woman feels she is owed something from her father and resents him for it. She also mentions “my mother’s hand opens in an early grave and I hold it out like a good daughter” (lines 6-7), which implies that she had a closer relationship with her mother and actually likes her mother unlike her father. However, by the end of the poem the girl says of her parents “you were each other’s bad bargain, not mine” (line 19), showing the reader that she not forgives her father in the sense that all is right again and she loves as everyone else loves their father, but in the sense that she is simply letting go of what her father did. She wants to forget and not spend her time awaiting repayment for things she has been wronged for. Also in this quote the girl puts some blame on her mother as well by referring to her mother as her father’s bad bargain, showing that while letting go of what her father did to her, the speaker concurrently loses some respect for her mother as well. 

These differences in forgiving their fathers can be attributed to a number of characteristics of the speakers in both poems. For one, the speaker in “My Papa’s Waltz” is a young boy talking about a childhood memory with his father, the reader can conclude from this that the little boy is so quick to forgive his father because he does not have another male role model in his life. Whereas in “Forgiving My Father” the speaker is a young woman who is clearly older than the boy in “My Papa’s Waltz,” and who early on chose her mother’s side when blaming her father for the things that went wrong in her early life. Also, the boy in “My Papa’s Waltz” saw his father every day, whereas the girl’s father in “Forgiving My Father” has been dead for a while. She was clearly very bitter toward her father seeing as she called him “old lecher” and “old liar,” and had much more built up anger than the boy had. It becomes hard to hold a grudge on someone when you see them constantly like the young boy, and much easier to hold a grudge when you never have to see the person you are angry at again. 

After having compared “My Papa’s Waltz” and “Forgiving My Father” the reader can see a number of resemblances between the two poems. They both include young people who have rough relationships with their fathers and struggle to forgive them, and upon reading a closer reading of the two the ways in which the speakers forgive their fathers becomes more apparent. Sometimes we forgive people constantly and do not realize the toll it really takes on us, like the young boy. And other times it takes us realizing that it is not worth the effort of being angry anymore and we simply let go of things holding us back, like the young woman. By taking a deeper look at how these speakers describe their experiences, we can see that the young boy still looks up to his father and respects his mother, while the girl in “Forgiving My Father” seemed to let bygones be bygones and stop being upset with her father and share some of the blame on her mother. These are important relationships for the reader to interpret because it gives them a deeper understanding of the character as a whole because you can see people’s true colors by how they treat their parents. 
