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Compare And Contrast Those Winter Sundays

Good Essays

Literature, poetry included, gives us the opportunity to understand a person’s experiences, or at least empathize with him or her. Often these experiences are categorized and labeled as themes; such themes include contrasting death to life, age, and regret. “Those Winter Sundays” and “Eating Together” focus on the death of the father of the narrator. Each poem also details briefly how the narrator has chosen to respond to his or her father’s death. One takes a particularly regretful stance on the issue, whereas the other focuses more on appreciating the time shared. This essay will explicate each poem, compare these explications, and compare the writers themselves. “Those Winter Sundays” uses imagery to help set the tone of the poem well, which showed the narrator’s regret over the father’s death. Although the word blueback actually refers to a type of fish, the author chooses to pair the term with “cold” to give a clearer image of the terrible cold in the house (2). The cold repeatedly mentioned in this poem is an extended metaphor for the narrator’s relation to his or her father. Opening the poem with this cold description places the reader’s mind in a sober, if not somber, mindset. This attitude helps the reader grasp the cold sadness of the narrator’s regrets. Contrastingly, the heat mentioned briefly completes the relationship metaphor with showing how the father and narrator’s relationship was warmer than the narrator realized (7). Though the relationship might have

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