Poems often share similar themes or ideas with other poems. Some themes involve love, nature, or death. Forgiving My Father by Lucille Clifton and Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden share the theme of relationships involving parent and child. Although they share the same theme, they share it in different ways. Forgiving my Father shows a negative and later forgotten relationship between a daughter and father, and Those Winter Sundays shows an apparent (or seemingly) positive but  undesirable relationship between son and father.

Forgiving My Father by Lucille Clifton is about a daughter and her relationship with her father. She is reflecting on her relationship with him as he had already passed away. She comes off as angry with her parents because of money problems. She felt angry and bitter towards her father because of his money problems. She refers to her father as an “old liar” suggesting she was on her mother’s side (Clifton, 10). Again speaking about her father she says, “you were the only son of a needy father”. By saying this, she is reflecting on how her father was raised and begins to think maybe it wasn’t all his fault and that was the way he was. She was “side by side in debtor’s boxes” symbolizing the lack of affection in her relationship with her father (Clifton, 22). Towards the end of the poem, she begins to realize that she can’t hold him accountable for the poor condition and relationship and begins to forgive him because she knows she will not get anywhere in life dwelling over the past. 

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden is about a son and his relationship with his father. He talks about how everyday, “Sundays too” (Hayden, 1), he would wake up and his father will have already done the hard stuff around the house to prepare for the day. He would do things like heating the house and polishing his son’s shoes. The narrator describes his dad as hardworking using words like “cracked hands that ached” (Hayden, 3) to show his assiduity and dedication. He talks about how he regrets not being more thankful. In the last stanza, he repeatedly asks “what did I know” (Hayden, 13), meaning he didn’t know any better when he was younger and took his father for granted. Now looking back, he feels bad that he didn’t thank his dad for more after all he had done. 

Those Winter Sundays and Forgiving My Father both talk about relationships with parents at the time when it is too late. In Those Winter Sundays, there is a feeling of regret from the author for not being more thankful for all his father did. However, in Forgiving My Father, the speaker focuses on a negative relationship with the father that is eventually just forgiven because she is tired of holding a useless grudge. These two poems’ main theme focuses on relationships with parents and regrets of how they were handled later on in the author’s lives.
