In many types of literature, authors use different themes and senses to describe similar situations. This, apparently, is the case with Those Winter Sundays and forgiving my father. Both pieces exemplify relationships with their fathers, and in one way or another, how they relate. Although the lenses vary between author and how they show the relationship, the message ends up becoming the theme of the poem. Whether the authors meant to do it or not, the bond, or lack thereof, between a father and his family is revealed in these texts in similar styles.

In Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays, the speaker exerts the idea that the father shows his love in an intimidating, yet compassionate, way. The poem starts out explaining that the father gets up early every day to heat up the house for the rest of the family before they woke up. Despite this act of pure selflessness, he also is a hard-working man who, unfortunately, does not get the appreciation he deserves from his family. In the next stanza, however, the evidence of tough love is revealed. After the house was warm enough to wake up the rest of the family, he would do so. The speaker of the poem explains this process from his point of view, “When the rooms were warm, he’d call, / and slowly I would ride and dress, / fearing the chronic angers of that house,” (Hayden 7-9). 

On the contrary, forgiving my father by Lucille Clifton explains a story that represents a bad relationship with their father figure. In the opening lines of the poem, the speaker introduces what will seem to be an issue regarding money. They talk about payday, but the dues are late. In the second stanza, the speaker tells how the father treated their family poorly and did not help with anything, from finances to being a liar too. Finally, in the last part of the poem, the speaker calls out the father with no remorse. After telling how he was unreliable, they go on to say, “you lie side by side in debtors’ boxes / and no accounting will open them up,” (Clifton 22-23). This death metaphor compares how his casket is his coward’s way out of his debt. This negative relationship with the father is shown in the text through the many signs that hint he was a bad man. 

There are various aspects to both works that can be put up against each other. The most obviously distinguished comparison is the relationship between the narrator and the father in each of the poems. In Hayden’s piece, the father shows love in a manner that exhibits compassion while keeping sort of a distant relationship. Meanwhile, the relationship that is seen in forgiving my father is just pure hatred and disrespect. Despite these differences, both works show the variety of father-child connections that are apparent in the world today.
