Comparison Essay

For the poetry essay, I have decided to compare "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year" by Raymond Carver and "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden. The basis of both poems are very similar to each other in that each has a grown man who sees who his father truly is and who has been all his life although they did not realize it when they were young. The father's are two men who have raised their children to the best of their ability and have expected nothing in return. The men worked hard to support their families and in their old age, they wore their wear and tare in a way that everyone could see. In "Those Winter Sundays," the father had "cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday." (Lines 3 and 4, Hayden) In "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year," the father's "eyes give him away, and the hands that limply offer the string of dead perch." I will compare and possibly contrast the father-son relationships and also the characters of each father.