Comparative Commentary 'The Boat' by Alistair MacLeod and 'Those Winter Days' by Robert Hayden

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Text 1: Those Winter Sundays – Robert Hayden (1966)

Text 2: Extract from ‘The Boat’ – Alistair MacLeod (1976)

When first looking at these two texts, the texts seem to be totally different from each other. But when you take a closer look, you find many similarities.

Text 1 is a poem from Robert Hayden called ‘Those Winter Days’, written in 1966. Text 2 is an extract from the short story ‘The Boat’ by Alistair MacLeod, published in 1976. Hayden and MacLeod want to teach the reader the lesson to love their father before it’s too late, like it was in the poem of Hayden. They both want to tell a story and entertain the audience.

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The first similarity is the theme. The theme of both texts is the love for a father. Both fathers are hard-working men who are not thanked for the work they do. The children of the fathers start to realize this and start to feel love for their fathers and appreciate them. They realize that their fathers don’t show their love in words or in a physical way, but in an indirect way; with actions.

In the first text, the child looks back on life and realized warming the house every Sunday was his father’s way to show his ...

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