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Essay Comparing My Papas Waltz And Those Winter Sundays

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The poems “My Papas Waltz” by Theodore Roethke and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden are similar and yet drastically different poems. The poems are similar because they share a main theme. The main theme is the two speakers of the poems are remembering their fathers. Both of the fathers in the poem seem to some many similarities, but for the most part are very different Individuals. Firstly, in the poem “My Papas Waltz”, the speaker describes his father and himself dancing. The speaker alludes that the poem is a memory from his child hood. Implied in the lines "The whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy” (Roethke lines 1-2). More importantly he depicts his father as an alcoholic. Unlike the father in the poem “Those Winter Sundays” where there is no mention of alcohol. Furthermore the speaker’s perspective is son or daughter reminiscing the things the father did for him or her as a child. …show more content…
The poem “My Papas Waltz” uses the dance itself as a metaphor for the speaker and his father’s relationships. The way the speaker says things such as “But I hung on like death/ Such waltzing was not easy” (Roethke 3-4), leads the reader to conclude that the speaker’s relationship with his father was one he valued very deeply but struggled to hold on to. Contradictory to “My Papa’s Waltz” the speaker in the poem “Those Winter Sundays” presents his father as a very giving man while at the time the speaker was very unappreciative and ungrateful. The speaker describes his relationship as a very distant but caring. Evidence can be provided by the quote “Sundays too my father got up early/ and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold” (Hayden lines 1-2) depicting how the father would wake early in the mornings, including Sundays, to start fire to warm the house. When he awoke his son the house would be warmed and rid of the “splintering” and “breaking”

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