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.