 The band Cinderella once said, “You don’t know what you got until it’s gone.” Most children don’t appreciate their parents and what their parents do for them until they leave the house. This is especially evident in the two poems that are compared in this essay. Robert Hayden grew up in the foster care system while Lucille Clifton grew up with a hard-working father in the steel mines. In Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays, the narrator tells a story about all that his father does for him and regrets not appreciating him more. In Lucille Clifton’s Forgiving My Father, the narrator talks about how her father’s responsibility was withheld from her and then eventually stops holding a grudge on him.  This essay will be comparing these two poems in attempt to show how the narrator’s attitudes change throughout the poems.

In Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays, the narrator starts off talking about all the hard work his father does. He writes, “Sundays too my father got up early / and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold/ then with cracked hands that ached,” (lines 1-3).  The narrator specifies Sundays too because Sundays are usually referred to as “off days” and it shows the dedication of the father that even on Sundays he wakes up early. The narrator also emphasizes the weather just to show the dedication of his father even more. The narrator goes on to say, “When the rooms were warm, he’d call / and slowly I’d rise and dress,” (7-8).  He says this to show that he never helped his father and let him do all the work. At the end of the poem the narrator says, “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (13-14). The narrator and his father did not have the best connection as the narrator says that he spoke indifferently to him, he still in the end could see the dedication his father had to his family and appreciated it. In the beginning, the narrator was too young to appreciate his father’s hard work and dedication. As he becomes grown, he finally realizes everything that his father did for him and his family. 

In Lucille Clifton’s Forgiving My Father, the narrator starts out talking about the neglect for her and the financial neglect her father has in an angrily tone. Clifton writes, “All week you have stood in my dreams / like a ghost, asking for more time / but today is payday, payday old man,” (lines 3-5). The narrator is saying that it was payday and that he didn’t have the money to pay his debts since he asked for more time as indicated in the line above. The narrator refers to her father as an old man and not father which is showing the separation between her and her father by not calling him that. The narrator also refers to her mother and an early grave meaning her mother died earlier and in a way that was unexpected, and one can assume through the tone of the author that the father had something to do with it. Throughout the middle of the poem, she refers to her father as an “old lecher” and an “old liar” in an angry tone but later in the poem her tone changes into a forgiving tone. Towards the end of the poem, she comes to terms with her father since he is dead and she realizes she has to move on and can’t hold a grudge anymore. Evidence supports how the narrator and her father had a detached and separated connection and how they don’t step up to the obligations of having a family.

However, both poems carry a familiar theme. This theme is a fatherly connection. In the beginning of Those Winter Sundays, the son had a detached connection from his father. Whereas in Forgiving My Father, the daughter also had a detached connection from her father. The narrator in Forgiving My Father has more a personal hatred for her father that is evident but in Those Winter Sundays, the reason that the father and son’s relationship is detached is because the son took his father’s hard work and dedication for granted. At the end of Robert Hayden’s poem, it’s clear that the narrator would have liked to have had a better connection with his father and regrets not having that relationship after his father is gone. In Lucille Clifton’s poem, the only reason the narrator gave up the grudge on her father was because he was dead and there was no use to hold a grudge anymore. 

In conclusion, the way the narrators behave in these poems creates the main point. Both poems address fathers and the way they act and how the child reacts to it. In Those Winter Sundays, the narrator regrets not having a better relationship with his father. In Forgiving My Father, the narrator decided that it is time to stop holding a grudge with her father so she can move on and lead a better life for herself. These poems can relate in the attitudes of the children towards their father but differentiates in how the children feel towards them when their fathers are gone. 
