Remembrance of Fathers In my poetry paper, I’ll be talking about three of the following poems, Daddy, Digging, and Those Winter Sundays. The first part that will be included in this essay will be three quick summaries on Daddy, Digging, and Those Winter Sundays. After finishing that, I will be discussing Daddy vs. internal Conflict on what she had to go through with her father’s death and why she hated him so much. Then after that, I will be focusing on comparing and Contrasting Daddy and Digging, and also be discussing the similarities and the differences on Digging and Those Winter Sundays.
Lastly, my conclusion will contain my thoughts about all the poems. Daddy takes place during world war two and it’s about a woman named Sylvia. The woman is having a hard time dealing and coping with her father’s death. While also, she is having a hard time escaping her father’s shadow and also at the same time she is trying to escape the judgement from others because her father Nazi soldier. Digging is about a man having a flashback of what he could’ve been. During this time he recalls a certain memory on how the family was poor and his dad worked out on the farm to dig up potatoes.
While looking back he is wondering if the choice he made not to follow his father’s footsteps and be a potato farmer was a good one or a bad choice. Those Winter Sundays is about a fully grown adult looking back at his past and remembering one of the hardships his father had to go through during the winter. The story starts out with the father waking up and changing his clothes in the cold, after that he heads to the fireplace to add wood to the fire to warm the house up.
When, the narrator wakes up in the warmth he never tells his father thank you. In the end when he comes back into reality. He’s a happy for what his father did for him, but he is also saddened because he never told him he was grateful for everything he has done. Throughout the whole poem you already knew that this story was going to be sad and depressing, because when you have some stories written like this, with something about world war one or something about the Holocaust, will always contain some type of sad and depressing content.
With Daddy the narrator is mostly depressed and it is not just because her father is dead, but it’s because now all the burdens and the hate her father had on him being a will now be carried on the Narrator’s shoulders. It’s not that she didn’t care for her father when he died, but she tends to hate him not just as a father, but as a person as well. With that being said, the people around her tend to look at her differently and not look at her for her, but they look at her as the daughter of a dead Nazi soldier. Many people always tended to judge her and her father with everlasting hate and violence.
With all of that going on, she almost fell into a pit of darkness and despair by trying to commit suicide several times and failed, she even married a man just like her father and that marriage didn’t work out either. After surviving through all the events that was thrown at her, in the end Sylvia finally learns to accept it for what is by saying line (80) “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”. The first biggest event that makes these two stories similar is that, they both start out with a flashback narratives about their early lives and the struggles they had to overcome.
The second event that makes these stories very similar is at the end of each of the poems, they both have that what if factor included in them. For example, in Daddy you always wondered what if she never escaped her dad’s shadow or what if this is all in her head and she is actually mentally insane. Another example would be in Digging, what if he decided to not take his own path and stayed digging potatoes like his father did to make a profit, and how his life would be now. The biggest event that make these poems different is that the father in Daddy is dead and in Digging we never know if the father is dead or not.
Another thing that stuck out between these poems was that in Daddy the narrator is a female, while in digging the narrator is a male. The next reason is that the setting in Daddy takes place around world war two, while Digging the setting takes place during the potato famine era. Lastly, the father in daddy is a dead Nazi with the narrator trying to escape his shadow, and in Digging the father is a farmer with narrator wondering if the path he chose was right or not. There is a couple of events that make these poems the same.
The first is, both of the narrators are really poor and they mostly had to rely on their fathers to make money. The other events that makes these poems the same is, that the narrators had to overcome the hardships of being poor, and they both had a hard time deciding what they did in the past was good or not. For example, in Digging the narrator wonders if the path he chose was right or not, and in Those Winter Sundays the narrator wonders if he should have been grateful for what his father had done for him. There’s a little bit of differences between these poems.
The first one is, in Those Winter Sundays the climate in this poem is winter, while in Digging it is spring. Another one is, that the narrator in Digging is looking down on his father, while in Those winter Sundays he is looking up to his father. Lastly, in Digging the narrator Irish and in Those Winter Sundays the narrator is American. In conclusion, my thoughts on these poems is that, I thought reading these made me sad and sad for the narrators of each of these poems. Because with Daddy, I feel like what she went through was worse than Digging and Those Winter Sundays.
The reason why I think that is because women still were not treated as equal as men. For her to go through all of that and be women, I would imagine it being really hard for her. Digging is the next poem I thought was worst than Those Winter Sundays. Because it’s really hard to grow potatoes to make money or feed your family, when the Potato Famine hit. With that being said, didn’t just cause damage to potatoes, but it caused damage to many crops, which made many of the people in Ireland starve to death or die from the spread disease.
Those Winter Sundays wasn’t as bad as all of the other poems, but I would think it would be hard for anyone that is poor to overcome this. That’s why I feel that the year took place was around the great depression era. The reason why I say that is because they aren’t homeless, it’s just that during that time no one got paid as much because of the stock market crash and the banks failed. Which caused many people to lose well-paying jobs, not until the World War 2 started and gave everyone that boost again to work.
