Compare and Contrast Poems?

Question

Can anyone help me write a compare and contrast essay for the poems
"The Gift" by Li-Young Lee
and
"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke
I need an intro. paragraph
body paragraph 1
body paragraph 2
conclusion paragraph

Answer 1

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"The Gift" is such a gentle poem making the reader see perhaps a simple Japanese room stark in it's decor with a humble man bowed over a small boy speaking in a gentle voice. "My Papa's Waltz" on the other hand makes the reader smile at the picture painted of a terrified child clinging like a tick to his drunken father's chest as he is waltzed around the kitchen in an exuberant though somewhat hazardous dance!

Li-Young Lee shows the reader a memory of his father that he cherishes. He realizes as an adult the way that his father distracted him in a gentle easy manner by telling him a story while he removed the sliver in his hand. He shows the reader that it made such an impression on him that he used the same technique to remove a sliver from his wife's hand. It is a gracious yet strong love that endures from generation to generation.

Theodore Roethke makes the reader smile if not laugh out loud at the raucous scene he paints! One can almost see the kitchen perhaps painted a shiney yellow, the wife\mother standing in the corner trying to be angry but smiling in spite of herself, and the huge man dancing drunkenly, clumsily with his wee son clinging to his father's chest for dear life as they caroom around the small room banging into counters, table and pans.

What certainly carries through in both poems is the the memory of a father's love. Each writer recalls a moment in time when they bonded with their father. And isn't that what life is all about?