Rough Draft of These Winter Sundays

“Those Winter Sundays” is a sonnet written by Robert Hayden. It contains 14 lines (which is typical of a sonnet) and it has three stanzas that do not follow a rhyming scheme. The poem seems to be about a man reflecting on his childhood and what his father did every Sunday and how he feels bad that he did not appreciate his father for everything he did because he did not understand a parent’s love.

The first stanza has five lines and the stanza describes what this child’s father does every morning including this current Sunday, “Sundays too my father got up early” (line 1). The stanza also talks about how hard the father works during the week and how little appreciation he got, “…with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him” (3-5). The first stanza explains that every morning the father gets up in the cold to make a fire to keep his family and himself warm and that his family probably does not have a lot a lot of money because in the poem it states that the father is a laborer who works during the weekdays and has cracked hands that also ache. Generally if someone is well off with money than they would not be a laborer who is working to the point that their hands both are cracked and ache. Another part of this poem that could also validate the theory that this family is rather poor is where the house does not have heat. This is evident in the poem because his father gets up early in the morning to create a fire to warm the house which strongly suggests that his family did not heat within their house and have to manually warm their house.

In the second stanza has four lines and the son explains how he’d wake up and hear the cold but the house would be warm (presumably because of his father who in the first stanza made a fire). “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call,” (6-7). The next half of the stanza the son says that his father would call him after the house was warm to get up and start his day. This is evident in lines 7 through 9, “…he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress,” This shows that the son would hear his father and he knew that he would had to get up but the poem suggests maybe he didn’t nessercially want to get out of his bed because the poem says that he would slowly rise from his bed. “fearing the chronic angers of that house,” (9). Suggesting that the son did not want to face the consequences of not getting up out of his bed and getting ready for the day out of fear. “Chronic angers of that house” could either mean that his father (or another unmentioned member of the house and family) has reoccurring anger issues that the walls of the house has symbolically seen acts of anger. The other way the last line of the second stanza could be interrupted is that the house itself is “angry” meaning that when the son moves around in his house that the house makes sounds like creaks that frighten him. Both interruptions are plausible, but the one most probable in this particular poem is the latter meaning of the house itself being “angry” because there is no evidence that the father or another member of the house is violent or deals with issues from anger. The latter theory also makes more sense if we consider the theory of the first stanza where the family does not have a lot of money because of the father’s occupation and the state of his health (the laborer with the cracked and hands that ache) which suggests that it is plausible that their house would be kind of old and maybe in shambles. This would make sense if the house were to creak or make sounds when someone is moving around because generally old houses tend to create sounds and to some people these sounds could be quite scary including the child in this poem.

The third and final stanza consists of five lines like the first stanza. In the first line which reads “Speaking indifferently to him,” (10), which means that the child did not speak any different to his father which also includes that he did not thank his father for the things his father did for him and the rest of the family. This is supported by the last line in the first stanza “No one ever thanked him.” (5). The second and third line of the last stanza say what his father did for him every Sunday, “who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well.” (11-12). The 11^th line in this poem means that creating a fire to warm the house therefore the father had “driven out the cold.” (11). The next line says “and polished my good shoes as well.” (12). This line can be interrupted as the son and his father are about to go to church. Tradiontally Sunday is the Day of the Sabbath in Christianity and generally families would not precipitate in work and they would go to church. Typically people who went to church would wear their best clothing which was appropriately referred to as their “Sunday’s best”.  The last two lines are where the mood seems to change where the child in the poem seems to have grown up and is questioning why he never thanked his father where he says “What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (13-14). Where he is basically saying he did not know what love was and how it could be shown but now he does and he feels bad for not thanking his father.