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Comparing My Father's Garden And Those Winter Sundays

Decent Essays

Nurturing Fathers The controversy of a man and woman’s place in a family has been argued over many centuries. Gender has always played a major roll in society and will continue to do so for as long as we live. Men are portrayed as the laborer and provider of the family, and the woman is looked at as the nurturer and comforter. This can be true but it does not mean a man can not nurture and comfort and a woman can not provide and partake in labor. Throughout the poems, “My Father’s Garden” and “Those Winter Sundays” the authors argue that Father’s nurture their children by making sacrifices. Davis Wagoner’s “My Father’s Garden” is a poem that uses a great deal of imagery throughout. I believe the narrator is the son of a steel mill worker. Throughout the first stanza the author writes, “To pierce the fireclay and set loose demons and dragons in …show more content…

The way he describes the junkyard, it is almost like a place of comfort for his father to get away from his intense job at the steel mill. We can assume the first stanza is taking place in hell, so with author introducing the junkyard as a comfort place for the father, the second stanza can be taking place in the Garden of Eden. The junkyard is much more to the father than an old scrap yard full of old car parts and metal, it’s almost as if the junkyard is a safe haven away from his dangerous job at the steel mill. “He would pick flowers for us: small gears and cogwheels with teeth like petals, with holes for anthers, long stalks of lead to be poured into toy soldiers, ball bearings as big as grapes to knock them down”(book). These few lines from the second stanza show how the father picks these things out of his garden to make stuff and give to his children as toys to comfort them. This shows how the father sacrifices his free time in his place of safety to think about his children and gather up scraps to form creations and shares them with his

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