In both "My Parents" by Steven Spender and "Discord in Childhood" by D.H. Lawrence, the speakers describe feelings about their childhood. What are the similarities and differences between the ways the poets present these feelings?

Both of these poems discuss issues of violence and discord in childhood as seen through the eyes of a child. However, whereas Spender's "My Parents" discusses issues of discord between the Spender family and others of a lower class ("children who were rough") against whom the speaker's parents present a united front ("My parents kept me from"—notice the shared verb), in Lawrence's poem, the violence takes place between the parents.
Lawrence uses the imagery of an ash tree's "terrible whips" to describe the interplay between his father and mother; the mother is described as "a slender lash / whistling delirious rage," while the father is described as "booming and bruising, until it drowned / The other voice in a silence of blood." Because the sound of the ash tree's "shrieks" frightened the speaker, the audible violence between his parents was categorized by his young brain; both situations filled him equally with fear.
Spender's poem is also about fear: "I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron." In this poem, however, the fear is not engendered by the speaker's parents, but by the boys who are animalistic ("like dogs"). They "threw mud" and "threw words like stones," mocking the speaker's "lisp" at which they "barked." Spender's parents are not remembered as fighting with each other, but as being protective, attempting to keep their child from the danger represented by these other boys. It is notable, however, that the overriding memory encapsulated in this poem is not of the parents at all; we may question the effectiveness of their attempts to keep their son from the attacks of the other children given the intensity of the remembered fear he describes.
Lawrence's poem, then, focuses strongly upon his parents and remembers them with fear. The fear in Spender's poem is not connected to his parents—he remembers them as attempting to keep him from it—as it seems to represent a memory more intense than that of the parents themselves, who are not assigned any qualities explicitly in the poem.