Comparing My Father's Song 'And Those Winter Sundays'

Poetry is a very powerful form of writing. Lots of times poems may seem very vague and the meaning of it is up to interpretation. My Father’s Song by Simon J. Ortiz is a beautiful story of a child missing their father. The speaker recounts an interaction with their father in the field when they saved some baby mice from their cornfield. The next poem is Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden. The unknown speaker talks about how the father would wake up early to take care of their family on “Sundays too” (Hayden 559). These two poems are both about working fathers that love their children but the tones are very different. To begin, Simon and Robert both wrote about an unnamed speaker and their father. Both fathers seem to be very hardworking men who work with their hands. In, My Father’s Song, the love of the father is more upfront and known by the reader. As you read you can tell that the speaker and the father had a strong relationship where the father would teach the child his trade. “We planted corn one Spring at Acu- we planted several times… My father had stopped at one point to show me an overturned furrow” (Ortiz 558). The other …show more content…
The reader may even be able to tell that the tones would be different from the titles. My Father’s Song sounds like it would be a warm, welcoming story. If that doesn’t give it away the first stanza of the poem will show the warmth and love, “Wanting to say things, I miss my father tonight. His voice, the slight catch, the depth from his thin chest, the tremble of emotions in something he has just said to his son, his song” (Ortiz 558). Those Winter Sundays sound like it would be a dreary, dark, cold story. The final lines of this poem, “What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (Hayden 559) the unnamed speaker is finally, sadly realizing his fathers love and commitment to their family even though he wasn’t

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Comparing My Father's Song 'And Those Winter Sundays'

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