Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and Lucille Clifton’s “Forgiving My Father” are both poems that display the conventional expectations of free form poetry. They are told in first person where the narrator is battling a problem that has effected them emotionally. Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” is told from the perspective of a child and the relationship with his father. The father works an immense amount to provide for his family and is not appreciated. The narrator reflects on how he treated his father and is deeply saddened by it; regretting that he did not give the respect and love that was owed to his father. Clifton’s “forgiving my father” is also told in the perspective of a child to her father. The father does not provide for his family and passes away leaving his daughter to take care of her family with a burden his daughter does not wish to carry. The narrator battles throughout the poem with coming to terms with her father’s deeds. Similarities can be seen between the two poems in what problems the narrators suffer from but there are differences in the source of their problems. 

The two fathers of the poems both struggle with the same thing, but the reasons why they suffer could not be farther apart. Both struggle with the negative relationship they have with their children. Hayden’s poem talks the father and son relationship stating, “No one ever thanked him.” and “Speaking indifferently to him,” (Hayden). These two lines show that the father was not appreciated by his son. In Clifton’s poem, the daughter is angered by her father’s incompetence stating, “there is no more time for you, there will never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher old liar.” (Clifton). The relationship between the narrator and her father in Clifton’s poem is filled with anger and frustration. The two poems find their common ground in their narrators problems. 

While the problem is the same for the two fathers in the poems, the source of the problem is far from similar. The father is Hayden’s poem is a hard worker and provides for his family, “then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze.” (Hayden). The source of the tension between the father and son lies in with the son and not being appreciative of his father while the father was alive.  The narrator admits this saying “What did I know, what did I know, of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (Hayden). In “Forgiving My Father” the daughters anger and frustration with her father is because her father did not provide for his family and left them with nothing after he died. Clifton writes, “you are the pocket that was going to open and come up empty any Friday.” and “but you were the only son of a needy father, the father of a needy son; you gave her all you had which was nothing.” (Clifton). The reason why the relationships are distraught between the fathers and their children are completely different but they still share the same problem. 

The two poems, “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden and “forgiving my father” by Lucille Clifton relate in what their problems are but are separated by the underlining cause. Hayden expresses the unappreciative relationship between the father and his son as a result of the son not realizing what his father had done for him. Clifton strains the stressful relationship between a daughter and her father but explains how it is a result of the father being incompetent of his responsibilities to provide for his family. The narrator’s situations with their fathers are unique in their own way but still have similarities that connect the two poems.
