Analysis Of Lucille Clifton's Forgiving My Father

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Next, we must summarize “Forgiving my Father” by Lucille Clifton, to discover the similarities between it and “My Papa’s Waltz”. In the poem we discover that the narrator's parents died and that she was haunted by several heated arguments between her parents over their finances. We get the sense that the daughter seems to be on her mother’s side as she used words like “old liar” and “old dead man” to describe her father. The daughter felt angry and hostile towards her father because she was put in the middle of a difficult marital relationship and felt responsible for their money problems. She realized that her father was “the son of a needy father” (Clifton, 13). Here, the daughter felt as though the father was raised in a household he

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