The nature versus nurture debate is one of the most famous and oldest arguments in developmental and behavioral psychology. Nature would be represented by pre-wiring or predisposed traits that someone is born with in their genetics and nurture would be from what they have watched and learned to do. The debate is concerned with whether particular aspects of behavior are influenced either by inheritance (genetics) or acquired characteristics (learned). Children learn their experiences most prominently from who they are raised by. Parents are very influential on their children this is a significant component for the nurture side of the argument. In “Those Winter Sundays”, written by Robert Hayden, and “Forgiving my Father”, written by Lucille Clifton, each of the speakers are telling about personal experiences with their own fathers. Hayden and Clifton’s poems convey two distinct viewpoints about the father figure, how the speakers were raised, and how they have been affected because of it.  

The speakers of “Those Winter Sundays” and “Forgiving my Father” each have opposite viewpoints about their own fathers. The speaker in "Those Winter Sundays" feels regretful about his apathetic attitude he had as a child because now he can fully appreciate all that his father does and had done for him. His current stance on his father is positive and appreciative. He now understands what his father goes/wet through because he also feels it at this point in his life when he states “What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?”(lines 13-14). With the nurture side of the debate, the speaker had learned from previous experiences how his father acted and now he is in the same position and can understand how his father felt. Through watched experiences, he now has the work ethic that his father had during his early childhood and can understand what he did not previously. The speaker of "Forgiving my Father" expresses her negative feelings about her father and how he did/does not provide for her and her mother. The father in this text acts the way his own father acted towards him and the speaker gives him a little credit because he does not know any better. “but you were the only son of a needy father, the father of a needy son;”(lines 12-13). The nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate suggests that a child will watch their parents and act as they do. This would explain why her father could not support the family like he should have but, to credit the nature side of the argument the speaker does not act like the father. This may suggest that in her DNA she has predisposed traits, possibly from her mother, that give her the instincts to take care of family first. Nurture relies very heavily on parental influence because for the first part of their life, children are mainly exposed to their parents and their actions.  

Both of the speakers in the poems tell of how they were raised and there is a great difference between the two. In “Those Winter Sundays”, the speaker tells how even on a Sunday, a weekend day of rest after a long week of labor, his father would still wake up early and work hard for the family. He provided for the family and as the speaker states “No one ever thanked him.”(line 5). As a child, he did not appreciate this hard work that his father went through to provide for the family and now as an adult and dealing with this same situation himself, he regrets his apathetic attitude. Robert Hayden was raised by foster parents in a poor Detroit neighborhood. Hayden’s own father had to work hard to provide for the family and Hayden himself probably did not realize the magnitude of this task until he had to work for his own family when he grew up which shows a direct correlation with his poem, “Those Winter Sundays”. The speaker of “Forgiving my Father” had a very different childhood than that of Hayden’s speaker. Clifton’s speaker hints that her childhood is absent of a true father figure and she is resentful about her father’s shortcomings. “…daddy daddy old leecher old liar. i wish you were rich so i could take it all and give that lady what she was due”(lines 9-11). Her father did not provide for her and her mother when she was younger and she is spiteful because of this. “The effects of the childhood environment, favorable or unfavorable, interact with all the processes of neurodevelopment (neurogenesis, migration, differentiation, apoptosis, arborization, synaptogenesis, synaptic sculpting, and myelination)”(Perry 1). Since the speaker’s childhood was “unfavorable”, the likelihood that she will have mistrust for her father when she is older is higher due to his constant neglect. Both of the speakers have grown in response to their upbringings and react in a distinct way.

Regardless of the speakers’ attitudes and feelings about their upbringings, they each have reacted in positive ways in response to how they were brought up. The speaker in “Those Winter Sundays” is regretful about his apathetic attitude he once had and this is proved because he has responded by being hardworking himself just like his father. He works to provide for the family even if that means not enjoying life as he ought to. The loneliness he feels allows him to finally runderstand just how his own father felt and how he wishes he would have thanked and appreciated him more. The speaker in “Forgiving my Father” reacts in a modest way by ultimately forgiving her father. In the end, the speaker forgives her father because she realizes she will not get anywhere in her life if she does not move forward from this situation that cannot be fixed. Although she forgives him, her attitude towards him is still negative and that cannot be changed as simply. A person is born with specific genes and in Phenotypic Plasticity: Beyond Nature and Nurture, Pigliucci writes “Phenotypic plasticity is the property of a given genotype to produce different phenotypes is response to distinct environmental conditions”(1). Everyone is born with specific traits (nature) but it is how these traits are developed (nurture) that affects the outcome. 

Hayden and Clifton’s poems both address the father figure but convey two distinct viewpoints. The speaker in “Those Winter Sundays” is grateful for his father’s hard work and appreciative of the hardships he had faced in order to provide for the family whereas the speaker in “Forgiving my Father” is spiteful for her father’s failures to the family. The main difference is how they were raised. The one speaker was in a home that had a father figure who put the family before himself and the other in a home where the father figure failed to provide for the speaker and her mother but each speaker still had a crooked viewed of the “father”. It is not until they are grown and reflecting upon their childhood do they realize the influence that their father had on them up until the present time. The nature versus nurture argument is particularly present in these two poems for it can explain the affects that parents have on their children. In conclusion of the nature versus nurture debate, the relative contribution of both genetics and acquired characteristics make up human behavior. Regardless of whether it predisposed traits in their genes or learned experiences, each of the speakers of the poems made conscious decisions on their opinions about each of their fathers. As motivational public speaker Brian Tracy says “You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.”
