Poetry Essay

For this essay I plan to compare “Do not go Gentle into that Good Night” to “Those Winter Sundays.” Both poems are told by speakers looking back on their childhoods and their relationships with their fathers. Each speaker has feelings of resentment towards their father, one in the past and one in the present. While one poem speaks of a father providing for his family during difficult times, the other speaks of the father’s final days. I plan to show how both speakers take their fathers for granted and seem naive about their father’s situations. I will also show how tension is prevalent in these poems. In “Do not go Gentle into that Good Night” the speaker’s expectations of his father seem both harsh and unrealistic. The speaker expects his father to be the man he was when he was healthy, which is not possible as he lies on his death bed. I will focus on why the speaker wants so desperately for his father to continue fighting for his life. In “Those Winter Sundays” the child doesn’t appreciate the battle his father faces every day to provide for his family. This is typical of a father-child relationship during a child’s adolescents. A parent’s love is often overlooked by children of this age, and I feel this poem brings this to light. I will point out various details in both of these poems in order to show the parent-child relationships presented by the speaker.