Father-Child Relationships In My Father's Love Letters And The Gift

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Throughout a number of readings covered in class this semester, fathers are featured prominently in very different lights. Some of these father-child relationships are presented in a positive way while some of these relationships are clearly strained. Three of these selections that showcase a father-child relationship include "My Father's Love Letter" by Yusef Komunyakaa, "Fishing" by A.E Stallings and "The Gift" by Li-Young Lee. Similar to the relationship Chelsea had with her father Norman in the movie "On Golden Pond", the relationship between the father and his daughter in the poem "Fishing" is very strange. Each of these selections showcase fathers and the different roles they play in their families. In the poem "My Father's Love Letters", the father is very contradictory in actions. He's a hardworking carpenter who was also an abuser whose actions led to the child's mother to run away. This father, every Friday, forces his son to write letters to his mother in hopes that she will come back. In lines 16-21, it states “Words rolled from under the pressure of my ballpoint: Love, Baby, Honey, Please. We sat in the quiet brutality , of voltage meters & pipe threaders, Lost between sentences . . .” These lines describes and gives the feeling of the pressure the child is under living with someone abusive and…show more content…
In fact, Lee describes his father in very gentle manner. In this poem, Lee describes a time when a splinter got stuck in his hand and his father pulled it out. It didn't have much significance to him until a similar situation happened and now he's doing the same thing to his wife. In lines four and five of the second stanza, Lee states, "And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness". This specific description brought back to his memory how gentle his dad was with him as he is now gently removing a splinter from his wife's hand as
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