Analysis of the father figures in a poem by Robert Hayden and a poem by Theodore Roethke.
This poem describes and analyzes how two different poems, “Those Winter Sundays”, by Robert Hayden, and “My Papa’s Waltz, by Theodore Roethke, portray a father. The paper also describes the feeling that the reader gets about the father and the relationship he has with his child.
In reading Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays,” one gets the feeling of the speaker’s finally having achieved enough distance from the subject of the poem to consider with equanimity what had to be a painful experience. Sundays too the father got up early, the poet confides, and however the reader might feel in later lines about the coldness of the man, she or he has to deal with the fact that this man is not slothful. He got up early not only six days a week but Sundays too…. The father performs a variety of services for the child: he reinvigorates the banked fire into a blaze to make the house warm for a rising that is not required before a modicum of comfort has been provided. And, not only did this father drive out the cold, but he polished a pair of good shoes, having provided, one must assume, at least another pair of shoes that are not so good.