Love Found Within Both poems are about a man's memories of his boyhood relationship with his Father. However, the experiences are very different. In " Those Winter Sundays"ÃÂ the father son relationship is carried by both father and son's in ability to communicate their love for each other. The total opposite is found in " My Papa's Waltz,"ÃÂ the love and communication is all present. With or without the communications it is clear, that the fathers love for his son and family is unconditional.
"Those Winter Sundays"ÃÂ is a short poem packed with meaning. For example, the it uses one event to explain a fathers whole relationship with his son. We find out from the first line that his father is a the central figure of the poem. Throughout the poem the father is depliced as a hard working man, " cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather."ÃÂ
This part of the poem serves as a symbol for all the pain and discomfort the father is willing to go through for his family. The speaker tells us that when he was a child, he did not recognize the efforts and the sacrifices his father made.
The line " No one ever thanked him, " reveals the other in the family were as unappreciative as he was.
An auditory image is introduced in the second stanza, " I'd wake up and hear the cold splintering, breaking."ÃÂ I interpreted this as the boy hearing the fire that his father man, crackling. The cold "splintering"ÃÂ and "breaking"ÃÂ showed him that his father was powerful, he could "break"ÃÂ the cold out of the house. The warm house on those winter Sundays symbolized the love the father had for his family.
It is interesting that this poem has been...