Poem Essay

     Those Winter Sundays, by Robert Haden, and My Papa's Waltz, by Theodore Roethike, are about the love given from a father to a son. Both are narrated by the son, telling the story of their relationship with their father. They take place in the houses of working class families. The reader can take the message that there are different ways to love from comparing the two poems.

     The father in Those Winter Sundays is showing his love for his son by working very hard. The reader can infer that the son is going back and realizing that his father did love him, just in a different way, and he is wishing that he could go back and fix things, but it is too late. One line from the poem is “Sundays too my father got up early...with cracked hands that ached from labor...No one ever thanked him.” When the narrator says this, he is implying that it includes him as well. An additional line is “Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out in the cold and polished my good shoes as well.” These are acts of love that the father had committed. The endmost line is “What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?” The reader can decide that the son is justifying himself, for he was young, and didn't know enough to perceive that his father had another way of loving him.

     My Papa's Waltz is about one specific event that expressed how much his father loved him. It is a short story of a father dancing playfully with his son in the kitchen after a long day of work. The first line of the poem is “The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy.” The reader can gather from this line that the father drinks alcohol when he gets home after a stressful day, possibly too much. Another line is “The hand that held my wrist was battered on one knuckle.” People get battered knuckles from doing tough physical work, and a large amount of it. Readers can conclude that this time together makes the man and boy very happy, and it would make this time that much more special and precious if they don't see each other as much as they would like to. Less time makes it harder to take things for granted.

     The two poems are similar to fire and ice, in that they are both significant and appreciative ways to love, but are much different. The father in Those Winter Sundays showed he loved him through things like polishing his shoes and working hard to take care of him. The father of My Papa's Waltz danced with the boy when he got home. The father in Those Winter Sundays used the time away from his son to love him, rather than taking the little time they had together and making it special. There are many ways to show feelings, and many are fair. The other lesson that may be extracted from these poems is that you don't need to be rich to love. You can be anybody, in any situation, and can love in the way you'd like. These poems portray beautiful messages that should not be forgotten.c