Poetry Essay

Father and son relationships are often very complicated. Both “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden and “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke are poems about father and son relationships. In “Those Winter Sundays”, the father and son have a poor relationship; the father is extremely selfless but the son doesn’t appreciate him for it. In “My Papa’s Waltz”, the father and son have a very fun, playful relationship, but only when the father is drinking. Both poems show different types of father son relationships.

            In “The Winter Sundays”, the father sacrifices a lot for his son. But, the son doesn’t realize what his father is doing or appreciate him for it. The father would get up early every day to start a fire and warm up the house so his son didn’t have to get up in the cold. The son says, “No one ever thanked him.” The father’s sacrifices weren’t even acknowledged. In the poem it says, “Speaking indifferently to him,/ who had driven out the cold/ and polished my good shoes as well.” The son doesn’t treat his father any different then he’d treat anyone when he should be very kind and grateful towards his father. When the son is grown up and looking back on his childhood he says, “What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?”  The author uses repetition to emphasize how the son didn’t understand what his father was doing for him. This makes the reader feel empathy for the father because he worked so hard and got nothing in return.

            In “My Papa’s Waltz”, the father drinks a lot and isn’t very reliable. The son says, “The whiskey on your breath/ could make a small boy dizzy.” This shows the father was drinking alcohol, at least enough to make him tipsy if not drunk. The son then goes on to say, “We romped until the pans/ slid from the kitchen shelf.” The father and son are playing around and making a mess. They are having fun but only because the father has been drinking. The son says while he and his father rough house, “My mother’s countenance/ could not unfrown itself.”  The mother is upset at the father and disapproves of how he is behaving around his son. As the father and son are dancing, the son says his father’s hand “Was battered on one knuckle.” This suggests that maybe the father got in a fight. The son goes even further to say that his father is missing steps and scraping his ear. The father is missing steps because he was drinking and then he is being careless with the safety of his son. The father is a lousy father but his son loves him because he plays and has fun with him once in a while. This makes the reader feel empathy for the son because his father is flaky, unreliable and a bad role model.

            Both “Those Winter Sundays” and “My Papa’s Waltz” show relationships between a father and son. In “Those Winter Sundays”, the father is a good father but his son doesn’t appreciate him. In “My Papa’s Waltz”, it is the opposite, the father is a bad father but he and son play and bond together. From these poems you can learn that no relationship is perfect. 

Night Essay

When going through hard times, some people reach to God for help, and some don’t. “Night” by Elie Wiesel is a non-fiction book about his own experiences in the Holocaust. The book starts in 1941 when Elie is about thirteen years old. He is living in Sighet, a small town in Transylvania. He is a devout Jew and takes religion very seriously. World War II is going on but no one thinks the German troops will ever reach them. But one day, they come. All the Jews in Sighet are forced onto a train with almost no food or water for several days. They are taken to a concentration camp where Elie and his father are separated from his mother and sisters. The reader infers that they are killed. Over the several years that Elie and father spend in concentration camps, Elie slowly loses his faith in God.

            In the beginning of the book, Elie is very interested in God and studying the Kabbalah. He is studying Judaism with Moishe the Beadle. Moishe devotes much of his time to his and Elie’s religious studying. One evening Moishe asks Elie why he prays. Elie is shocked by this question and doesn’t know how to respond. He thinks to himself “Why did I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” (p. 4). Elie takes comfort in God and praying. To him, it is natural. He was only 13 years old at the time yet he “…studied the Talmud [by day] and by night I would run to weep over the destruction of the temple.” (p. 3). Even at such a young age he was very serious about his studies and his practice.

            When the German troops come and take all the Jews away, Elie is still practicing Judaism and believes God will save him and his people. But as Elie spends some time in concentration camps, you see him start to lose faith. As Elie and his father are entering their first concentration camp, the weak are being separated and thrown into a fire. As they are waiting to be looked over, Elie’s father starts to pray, saying, “May His [God’s] name be celebrated and sanctified…” (p. 33) Elie hears his father praying and says, “For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank him for?” (p. 33). This is the first time you see Elie start to separate from religion, questioning God and his motives. He no longer knows what to believe, his studying with Moishe or the unattended to pain and hurt in the eyes of his people.

            After spending a year or two in concentration camps, you see Elie give up on God and his religious beliefs. In the camps, he has been whipped, starved and treated as an object to be owned, not a person. One day, the prisoners, including Elie and His father, are called to roll call. They are forced to watch a young boy be hanged. In front of him, Elie hears someone ask, “‘For God’s sake, where is God?’” (p. 65). Elie responds to this man saying, “‘Where He is? This is where – hanging here from this gallows…’” (p. 65). This is the point in the book where you see Elie give up on God. At such a young age, only 15 years old, he has seen so much death and sorrow that he believes God, the immortal, must be dead, along with the rest of the Jews.

            Especially hard or troubling times in people lives can make them reach to or away from God. In Elie Wiesel’s case, in his non-fiction account of his own struggles in the Holocaust, it’s away. As Elie deals with being forced from his home and separation from his mother and sisters, he starts to lose belief in God and his own religion, one he practiced very strongly before. He rebels against God, at one point almost yelling at him for all the destruction he allowed to continue. When he loses religion, he loses an extremely important part of his life, and once his father dies, he has no one to turn to for comfort. The last line of the book is “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.” (p. 115). With the lack of love or religion in his life, Elie doesn’t feel like a real person anymore.