Aileen Lora
November 6, 2015
Period 2
The poems “My Papa’s Waltz” and “Those Winter Sundays” have interesting ways of describing the character of the father. It all starts with the small details in which Theodore Roethke and Robert Hayden use specific word choice. Both poems make the father look a certain type of way. These poems are similar and different in many ways. Both poems may be difficult to understand but once you go deep into what they are trying to convey you can notice the difference.
“My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke is a poem about a son and a father. In the poem you notice that the Roethke uses negative words or phrases like “The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy” “But I hung like death” “My mother’s countenance could not unfrown itself.” “The hand that held my wrist was battered on one knuckle” and “You beat time on my head with a palm caked hard by dirt”. Roethke used diction to describe that he had a loving yet scary relationship with his father. It is like the son has a bad memory with his father. The poem seems to be about an abusive drunk father. But those could just be metaphors or secret meanings to the poet.
The poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden seems to be the opposite of Roethke’s poem when it comes to diction. Hayden uses words like “then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him”. The difference between “Those Winter Sundays” and “My Papa’s Waltz” is that “Those Winter Sundays” doesn’t use harsh words. In this poem, it describes the father being hardworking and a person that sacrifices a lot for his family and I think that the child in the poem admires that about his father. The father would have to wake up early even on Sunday mornings to make the house warm for his family.
The similarity of “My Papa’s Waltz” and “Those Winter Sunday’s ” is in a way, the child had some sort of admiration for the father, even though in “My Papa’s Waltz” the child spoke of his father in an afraid and negative tone. You can tell that the children in the poem look up to their father in some way. To me, the tone of both poems sound depressing because in “My Papa’s Waltz” it sounds like the father is an alcoholic that beats him and in the “Those Winter Sundays” the father seems to go through so much and works a lot for his family.
