Robert Hayden depicts a relationship in which the father is shown as emotionally detached and unaffectionate. He comes off as a very stereotypical provider and is clearly a very hard working man in that he had “cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made”(3-4). He takes his role as the man of the house very seriously, and he shows his love by being the provider of the house. If the cold in the poem represents the emotional detachment of the father and son, then the father warming the house parelles him fulfilling his duties of being a father in order to show his love to his son.

The prompt i was writing about in this example was to analyse and compare the father-son relationship between two poems. In this example i introduced the quote by stating that the writer of the poem, Robert Hayden, “depicts a relationship” which explains who the speaker is. I also set up what the quotation says by explaining that the father is a hardworking man. The quote was integrated into my text by not simply restating what the author said, instead the flow of the sentence would not have been interrupted whether or not there was quote in it. I explained the quote and showed how it relates to the text in the lines that follow the quotation. The relationship between the father and son in this example is detached and unemotional, but the quotation demonstrates that the father shows his love by being the provider of the house.

Although at first it appears as this is just a pleasant memory the speaker has of his father, there is an undertone that hints at an aspect of violence in the dance, just like the relationship between the father and son. The speaker mentions that “At every step you missed/ my right ear scraped a buckle”(11-12).This poem was written in an iambic trimeter in order to mirror the three beat tempo of a waltz, but occasionally the lines have a misbeat. The author is hinting that for the most part the father is a loving man, but he occasionally he has a “misbeat” which causes pain for his son.  Like the cold winter sundays reflect cold relationship between Robert Hayden’s characters, the imperfect dance between Roethke’s characters mirror the ebb and flow in their relationship

This example is from the same prompt as the previous one. I introduced this quote by stating that “the speaker mentions”, and then integrated the quote into my paper. I explained what the quote means in the lines preceding the quote as well as the ones that followed. I explained that the father in the second poem was more affectionate, but he occasionally would slip up and cause harm to his son, like in the waltz metaphor where he would miss a step and the speaker's ear would scrape the buckle. I indicated how it related to the text when i compared the two relationships in the poems. I compared the two extended metaphors in the poems and how they mirrored the relationships between the fathers and their sons.