The two poems I have chosen to analyze are Daystar by Rita Dove and Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden. The poem Daystar struck me from the first reading because I do the same thing this woman did sometimes. The apartment I share with my husband has a balcony where I have planted flowers, and sometimes, when the weather is nice, I drag a rocking chair out into the sun and sit and let my thoughts wander. This poem reminds me of those moments. The author uses imagery in the poem to bring out this woman's experience vividly. The first lines of the poem say: "he saw steaming diapers on the line / a doll slumped behind the door." The phrase "steaming on the line" is especially strong, making me feel the mild heat of the day and the bright, warm sun on my skin. Additionally, the diapers and the doll can serve as symbols in this poem for all the care the woman brings into caring for her children. Right now he wants to leave everything behind and doesn't want anything to remind him of it. He wants to escape to a place where there are no demands. Another visual image in this poem occurs when the woman looks around her yard and sees “the pinched armor of a missing cricket, / a floating maple leaf.” These are little things that grab your attention for a second, not things to sit and contemplate. I think the point is that the woman doesn't really want to think about anything, she just wants to be. Sometimes he doesn't even want to look at anything, but closes his eyes and sees only "his vivid blood." This image of the woman looking at her own blood makes it seem like this time alone reminds her that she is very much "alive" -- that she has free will and can ... middle of paper ... .but something that the mother is doing for herself, while the second poem talks about the sacrifices the father made for his son. Their comparison shows that the mother is the more "selfish" of the two, as her son and husband are distractions from her revelries and are somewhat burdensome to her. But the father sacrifices himself completely: he gets up in the "blue-black cold", lights a fire with "chapped and aching hands". He does not care about his own well-being, except, perhaps, when he gets angry. This makes me think that if the father had spent some time relaxing like the mother, maybe he wouldn't have been so angry. Maybe thinking about yourself every now and then is a good thing, I don't know, but it's interesting to note the contrast. I think the mother in the first poem is the person we can relate to, but the father in the second poem is someone we admire.