Responses to the Poems

Responses to the Poems

"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden

"Those Winter Sundays" has been read autobiographically as expressing Hayden's conflicting feelings toward his foster father. It ranks high among poems on a child's emotional response to a parent (Buck, 2008). The ending of the first stanza acknowledges that the family showed no appreciation for the father, the clearly personal narrative of the second stanza, in which the child awakes and rises, prepares for the third stanza, in which the speaker rebukes himself. Here the poet continuous to stress the process, continuity, and current awareness of his ungratefulness for his father's kind deeds. The closing lines express despair at this insensitivity.

"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke

"My Papa's Waltz" is one of the most anthologized and recognizable of Theodore Roethke's poems (Underwood, 2008). The great conflict in "My Papa's Waltz" involves the ambivalent feelings the grown son has about memories of his father. The word choice and imagery reflect violence: The father holds the boy's wrist, not his hand, and taps out the dance beat on the son's head; the action of the dance repeatedly scrapes the son's ear against the father's belt buckle. The presence of a third person in the scene—the boy's mother—reveals another conflict. As the mother watches the two dances, her frown indicates the anxiety and sadness that affects the entire family. The poem ends with the seemingly benign image of the boy hanging onto his father as he is put to bed, but, as with his own life, the conflict is left unresolved.

"Daddy" by Sylvia Plath

"Daddy" is one of the best-known examples of confessional poetry in 20th-century literature. "Daddy" expresses anger and bitterness, blending terse statements with repetitive phrasing and violent imagery. The poem rehearses Plath's unresolved feelings about her father, who died when she ...