You’ll discuss the fathers, compare them, and compare them to your own father (or to yourself, if you’re a father).

Of the 2 poems listed below Compare and Contrast, You’ll discuss the fathers, compare them, and compare them to your own father (or to yourself, if you’re a father).

Your essay should have a clear Thesis statement, with developed paragraphs and clear topic sentences in each paragraph. You should include an introduction and conclusion, but they do not have to be “fancy”

Those Winter Sundays”

By Robert Hayden (1980)

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. (Line 5)

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him, (Line 10)

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year”

by Raymond Carver (1988)

October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen

I study my father’s embarrassed young man’s face.

Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string

of spiny yellow perch, in the other

a bottle of Carlsbad beer. (Line 5)

In jeans and denim shirt, he leans

against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.

He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,

wear his old hat cocked over his ear.

All his life my father wanted to be bold. (Line 10)

But the eyes give him away, and the hands

that limply offer the string of dead perch

and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,

yet how can I say thank you, I who can’t hold my liquor either,

and don’t even know the places to fish? (Line 15)