Li-Young Lee’s “The Gift,” Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” and Eric Chock’s “Poem for My Father” all center on the poets’ fathers and contain a belated recognition and thanks for all their fathers have done for them. Each of these poems focuses on a theme: love, in the first, devotion in the second and obligation in the third, but all acknowledge the continuity between generations as the poets prepare to take on their responsibilities as parents and spouses. In “The Gift” Li-Young Lee distracts his wife with a story while he removes a splinter from her hand, just as his father long ago told him a story to keep his attention off the pain. The boy looks into his father’s face as the reader assumes the wife does during the operation. The poet addresses the reader, saying that if the reader had witnessed his father’s removal of the splinter he would have thought he was planting something in the boy’s hand, something that led to his performing the same operation on his wife for which she will reward him, as he did his father, with a kiss. The continuity of the action stretches further than from the boy to the man. Lee describes how each generation performs the same unselfish acts of love and care for those who depend on them. That is the theme of the poem and it is strengthened by each descriptive word and phrase. His father’s “lovely face,” meaning the beloved face, is the face of the man who nurtures and protects him; a well of dark water describes the voice, deep, strange in that it speaks out of a life unknown to the boy and yet that voice is familiar and, like a well, life-sustaining. These are the images that cancel out the sharp, life-threatening splinter and the even sharper blade used to remove it, wielded by hands that are the source of tenderness, skill and discipline. The splinter is likened to a silver tear, a tiny fire, antithetical yet connected by his pain. It is this experience that has taught him to empathize with his wife’s pain and so prepared him to help her by extracting the splinter as painlessly as his father would have. In that way he, too, is able to remove the threat and to save her from having to face her death, no matter how minor the threat of that may be, so that she may remain mindful of her life with him. As the anonymous commentator from Art and Culture says, in this poem “we see the concentric circles that ripple outward from unconditional, familial love,” a love that only reveals itself in time and through deep reflection. It seems as though the poet is saying that love is what binds us together and creates the continuity between generations, and surfaces only in those small but clearly remembered gifts such as taking a splinter out of a small boy’s palm. Linda Sue Grimes, in her analysis of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” makes the same point when she says that “none of us understands the sacrifices our parents make for us while they are making them.” They only become clear much later in life when we ourselves are parents or spouses. The narrator in this poem recalls a routine event from his childhood and endows it with almost religious significance, a ritual, an “office” to be performed every Sunday morning for no reason other than