Those Winter Sundays

            
             Both Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" and Theodore Roenke's "My Papa's Waltz", exists the theme of family camaraderie in a parent-child context. Both literary works shows examples of parent-child relationship that provides the readers for different interpretations. Both poems convey to a thesis that though a person (a child in this case) can feel lonely or going through a hard time, he or she can always enjoy the love, company and the hardworking support from their family. In these scenarios, the speakers' respective fathers. .
             In "My Papa's Waltz by Robert Hayden, the speaker of the poem is a young boy who is reminiscing on the times spent with his father. When readers first read through the poem, different interpretations can be drawn, some readers immediately get the impression that the father is beating his child unemotionally while others interoperates the situation has just a father dancing with his son and just having a fun time, almost to a family-ritual degree. Readers might conclude that child-abuse is present through lines 10 and 13, "The hand.was battered on one knuckle, my right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head." But in reality, the father is just having a good time with his son. In fact the line "the hand. Was battered on one knuckle" actually refers to the physical deterioration of his hands from the grunt work that he does. This also shows that this particular family isn't economically adapted therefore the father is required to have such a job that makes him tired at night ("whiskey on your breathe") and physically challenged; ("battered knuckle") .
             The idea in "My Papa's Waltz" about families without economic flexibilities can also be drawn a similarity to "Those Winter Sundays". The aspect of a family struggling economically in "Those Winter Sundays" can be seen in the first two lines of the poem when the speaker says "Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold.