poem:
Those Winter Sundays (1947)
By Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 5
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, 10 who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
questions:
4. How would you describe the father-son relationship in “Those Winter Sundays”? Why might Hayden describe the boy as “fearing” the “chronic angers” of the house (9)? Why does the boy speak “indifferently” to his father (10)?
5. In “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden makes strategic use of sound devices to deepen the poem’s meaning. For example, he makes frequent use of consonance by using the “ck” sounds. How many “ck” sounds can you find in the poem? How might the abundance of these “cracking” consonants contribute to the poem’s meaning?
6. Is there a place in the poem where the “ck” sounds fade away? Where? Do the “ck” sounds get replaced by a different kind of sound? How might that be significant?
7. In “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden makes use of tactile imagery in order to reveal important information about the father as well as the father-son relationship. What does the poet’s use of tactile imagery reveal about the speaker’s father? What does it reveal about the father-son relationship? Finally, what kind of tactile imagery is conspicuously absent or missing from the poem? How might its absence be significant?
8. Would you describe the father in Hayden’s poem as emotionally expressive? Why or why not? Would you describe the father as feeling “love” for his son? If so, how does the father express his love?
9. Robert Hayden’s poem contains a syntactic rhythm whereby a long descriptive sentence is followed by a short reflective sentence. In the poem’s first stanza, the short sentence is, “No one ever thanked him” (5). How does the syntactic structure of this rhythm, specifically this short sentence, have on the meaning of the poem, or this section of the poem?
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