Those Winter Sundays 'And All Bad, Dad, Not Bad'

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The poems “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert E. Hayden and “Not Bad, Dad, Not Bad” by Jan Heller Levi both reveal an adult’s buried remorse of never truly appreciating their father while growing up. Word for word, “Not Bad, Dad, Not Bad” details an event in the narrator’s childhood where her father struggles to save her from drowning but fails to do so. In the poem, the narrator compares her father’s parenting in an abstract manner, equating it to her father swimming in an ocean towards the narrator as she drowns. Thus, swimming is used as a metaphor for their tumultuous father-daughter relationship where the father never meets his daughter’s expectations to the fullest. In literal terms, “Those Winter Sundays” depicts the memories of the narrator as a child whose father woke up before sunrise to work …show more content…
The imagery presented in “Not Bad, Dad, Not Bad” allows the reader to view their own father(s) in a different perspective. It reveals that one must look with their heart and not their eyes before judging their parents’ love. Because the narrator as a child expected her father to be a flawless swimmer, she critiqued his swimming instead of embracing his love. In like manner, “Those Winter Sundays” has more vivid imagery to influence the reader and reinforce its metaphorical undertone. Hayden uses consonance and synthesia in the first stanza to help readers envision the narrator’s father’s dismal life. While Sundays are most often a day of rest, the narrator’s father would wake up before dawn to work in raw weather to provide for a family of ingrates. The father would “put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, / then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made / banked fires blaze.” Although the father toiled in biting cold for those he loved, “No one ever thanked him.” The consonance in “blueback” makes one repeat a hard “B” sound; and combined with “cold,” it
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