In the two pieces of writings, “forgiving my father” by Lucille Clifton, and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden both offer an insight of what their fathers meant to them through their emotions and feelings that they have created from growing up and developing an opinion on their fathers. Robert Hayden was a child in foster care for most of his life and grew up in a low income part of town in Detroit, Michigan. However, he went on to pursue higher education and took poetry under his wing while he earned his masters degree at University of Michigan, which from there, he continued to publish poetry. Lucille Clifton was raised in a suburb in New York and took up poetry while she was in college, where she graduated from the State University of New York College in 1955. She then went on to teach literature and and creative writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz as well as at St.Mary's College of Maryland. Many people think that you must love your father because he is your father. However, indefinable situations may sometimes interrupt the love that is thought to be a given bond between a child and father. In “forgiving my father,” the narrators opinion of her father is very disappointed and aggravated, yet accepting of who he was. This poem illustrates that the relationship between her and her father was not necessarily the best due to the hard situation that her father had put her through. In “Those Winter Sundays”, the narrator grew up appreciating his father for all the things he did for the family when he grew up. The two fathers in both poems have different aspects of how they acted and lived as the narrator grew up in their presence, which led to them having very different opinions of their fathers which emphasized that different situations and instances causes people to have different opinions of their father.

“forgiving my father” is a piece of writing that focuses on the negatives of the relationship between father and daughter. The narrator is upset with how her father was when she grew up. Her father never had the money to pay the bills, and her mother and herself always had to supply the money. In line 10, it states “i wish you were rich so i could take it all” (Lucille 525). The narrator was aggravated that her dad never had anything and was always needing something because her father was “the son of a needy father” (Clifton 525). However, her attitude towards her father changed to accepting him for who he was because he never had anything. At the end of the poem, she sits waiting to collect anything from her passed father, but she knows that there will be nothing because her father had nothing to give. In the poem, it states that her mother and she had to always give him things and money because he kept “asking for more” but he would have nothing to return (Clifton 525). The piece of literature emphasizes the example of her father creating a life for the narrator that had resulted in anger and aggravation, which caused her to forgive her father so that she could move on with her own life.

The contrasting piece “Those Winter Sundays,” shows a more appreciative and understanding tone when expressing his or her feelings about the narrators father. In this poem, the narrator describes the basic chores that his father performed on the cold and wintery morning before everyone else. In the last stanza, Hayden describes how he did not even acknowledge or appreciate what his father had done for him and his family by stating that he “spoke indifferently to his father who had driven out the cold” (Hayden 524). This important line shows how the narrator processed how much his father actually meant to him for all the little things that his father had done. In the last lines, the narrator realizes and appreciates all that his father has done for him because he reflects on all that does father did without the unspoken thanks from his family, even though that he did everything on his own out of simple love.

Both poems are about a a father and child, and one might think that it is important to love your father. However, that is not true just to the fact that you have a father. In “forgiving my father,” the father clearly did not provide enough or give anything that the narrator needed due to the love lacking expressions, “there is no more time for you. there will never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher (Clifton 525),” and anger and aggravation, “i wish you were rich so i could take it all (Clifton 525),” that was portrayed in the writing of the poem. However, in “Those Winter Sundays” the narrator realizes the importance and positive stigma that the father had exhibited from growing up because of how his father did everything in a silent manner without being thanked by anyone, which ultimately made the narrator reflect on the past of how he never thanked his father for the unnoticed love. Loving your father can be determined by the feelings and emotions created by the fathers actions and decisions that play a role on the children.  
