Poems: Those Winter Sundays, Ballad of Birmingham, My Papa’s Waltz (Essay Sample)

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Poetry
Poetry is considered a literary work that utilizes distinctive rhymes, rhythms, and styles to express specific ideas, feelings, and beliefs. In fact, it is usually a platform that many poets employ to disperse specific themes of life or nature to precise audiences. These facts make poetry an interesting and important aspect of life. In this regard, this paper intends to analyze three poems. The poems include Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays, Dudley Randall’s Ballad of Birmingham, and My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke. Even though each of these poems focuses on different primary subjects, the theme of love stands out or can be identified in all of them easily. This paper, therefore, intends to illustrate the manner in which all these poems connect to this same theme of love.
Starting with Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays, the theme of love manifests itself in various ways. In fact, the poem connects to this theme of love through the description of the love of a father towards his son. Furthermore, it portrays the love of the son towards his father through the lenses of admiration. The love of the father towards his son manifests when he wakes up early in the morning in the cold darkness, to make a fire intended to warm up the house for his son that is still dreaming in his sleep. This occurrence is pinpointed to be taking place every day of the week from Monday to Sunday, a fact that further highlights the love of the father towards his son. Hayden writes, “Sundays too my father got up early” (1). This line proves that the father woke up every day, and the initial Hayden’s memory of the unspecified other six days of the week is highlighted. The author also writes, “…in the blueblack cold” (2) and “…banked fires blaze” (5) to emphasize the notion that the early morning was always cold and his father woke up to make a fire respectively. In the same note, the love of the son towards the father manifests through the lenses of admiration when Hayden writes, “What did I know, what did I know…” (13), which is more of a statement than a question to show the manner in which the poet adores his father.
As earlier stated, in Dudley Randall’s Ballad of Birmingham, love is not the main theme. Nonetheless, the poem connects to it in a significant way, and it manifests clearly in the same such that it is worth being mentioned. At the beginning of the poem, a girl persuades her mother to let her go and be part of the Freedom Match. This notion can be identified when Randall writes, “…And march the streets of Birmingham/In a Freedom March today?” (3-4). However, her mother disagrees with her daughter and advises her not to go to the Freedom Match. This fact is so because she fears that her daughter might be a victim of the war or violence taking place. She fears that a bullet might end her daughter’s life. Randall writes, “No, baby, no, you may not go,/For I fear those guns will fire” (13-14), to highlight the sentiment that the mother advises her daughter not to attend the Freedom Match because of its violent nature that might end the latter’s life. The platform in which the mother’s advice to her daughter is embedded is love. In fact, the fear that the mother has that her daughter might lose her life in the Freedom March emerges because of the underlying love for the unnamed girl. The fact that the girl also obeyed and respected her mother to the point of not going to the Freedom Match portrays some elements of the love she has for her mother.
The theme of love is widely used in many poems, and in My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke, it can also easily be identified. The poem connects to this theme of love through the portrayal of the complicated relationship that the poet has with his father. This complication is brought about by the poet both loving and fearing his father because of the latter’s careen nature after being drunk while swinging the speaker around dangerously. The drunken nature of the poet’s father can be pinpointed when Roethke writes, “The whiskey on your breath/Could make a small boy dizzy” (1-2). In such a state the father carries the poet, and their movement is like a waltz that makes the poet afraid to the point of ...