Simon J. Ortiz\'s \"My Father\'s

¶ … Simon J. Ortiz's "My Father's Song" and Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" are poetic tributes to fathers. In both poems, the speakers remember and even eulogize their fathers. Although Hayden's speaker comes across as being embittered due to "the chronic angers of that house," he recognizes that his father's labor went unappreciated. Hayden's poem is the speaker's way of rectifying his father's faults and offering thanks.

Ortiz's poem is much more sentimental in tone than Hayden's, offering an anecdote about the father finding a cluster of newborn mice in a field and delivering them to safety in the "sand moist clod." Both Ortiz and Hayden encourage the reader to appreciate their fathers, no matter what their faults may be or have been. The two poems offer compassionate insight into masculinity and fatherhood.

The first line of Ortiz's "My Father's Song" is "Wanting to say things." Almost as if he starts mid-sentence, the speaker draws the reader into the poem. Then, the speaker comes right out and states, "I miss my father tonight." He feels "the tremble of emotion" that he witnessed in his father. The last word of the first stanza is "song," connected with the title of the poem. "My Father's Song" is like an old-fashioned ode, only one about the love of son for father.

"Those Winter Sundays" is a far different type of paternal tribute. In Hayden's poem, phrases like "I miss my father" and "the tremble of emotion" are missing. Instead, the speaker implies that he misses his father and feels the tremble of emotion. The speaker admits that his father was not the most expressive emotionally, and in fact may have even been abusive. In fact, the speaker does mention the "chronic angers of that house" and the fear he felt around his dad. They were not close, and the speaker eulogizes his father because he recognizes with the wisdom of age that hard work had worn down the man.

The title of Hayden's poem creates a mood, tone, and setting. Winter is a time of retreat and frigid weather, and imagery of cold permeates the poem. Coldness is also the core emotion that the speaker conveys. The cold is "blueblack," which also signals a possible bruise, as if the father was indeed abusive. The father had "cracked hands that ached," which were not from the cold, though, but from his hard work, his labor in the "weekday weather."

Imagery of "splintering and breaking" is contrasted with the powerful last line of "Those Winter Sundays," which refers to "love's austere and lonely offices." Love is neither austere nor lonely in Simon Ortiz's "My Father's Song." In "My Father's Song," the imagery is far more summery. Like the speaker in "Those Winter Sundays," the speaker in "My Father's Song" refers to his dad's manual labor in the fields. Yet labor did not break his spirit as it did to the speaker in Hayden's poem. Instead, labor and hardship seems to have made the father stronger and more emotionally resilient. The compassion he shows for the family of mice is an intense anecdote that testifies as to the nature of the father.