Rough Draft

“Those Winter Sundays” is a contemporary 14 line sonnet written by Robert Hayden. Although it does qualify as a sonnet, it’s lack of a rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter make it seem quite experimental. The poem is a reflection of an adult on his childhood, and the theme is the lack of appreciation children often have for their parents. Through the use of words and imagery, Hayden creates a  portrait of a hardworking father whose efforts go unnoticed. 

The first stanza is comprised of 5 lines that set up a chilly atmosphere which will remain for the rest of the poem. Phrases like “blueback cold” and “cracked hands that ache” add to this atmosphere of painful cold, while  “fires blaze” provides a direct contrast. The fact that the father made banked fires (fires that are burning low) blaze shows that he had the ability to make something out of nothing. The speaker is setting his father up as a protagonist by associating him with warmth in a stanza otherwise concerned with cold. The father wakes up early, even on Sunday, to provide warmth for his family. We know that the father works during the week because we are told of his “labor in the weekday weather”. This is important because we can infer that Sunday is his only day to relax.   At the end of the stanza, the speaker simply says “No one every thanked him”. There are no excuses or justifications in this like, just acknowledgement. By saying “no one” instead of “I”, we know that there were other people who should have been thanking the father. 

The second stanza has 4 lines, and provides us with insight about the speaker’s home life. Upon waking, he hears “cold splintering, breaking”. These noises have double meanings, one being the sound of the father preparing the fire and the other being the splintering and breaking of a family. Perhaps this can be seen as a metaphor for a child waking up to the sound of his parents fighting. Line 9 makes this seem even more likely when we learn that the speaker feared “the chronic angers of that house”. This implies that there was always tension in the home. A wife or mother is never mentioned, so we don’t know if she was a bad mother or was even present at all. The conflict that the father is trying to protect himself from is unclear, and this leads one to assume that it is still an uncomfortable subject for the speaker as this poem is being written. The speaker’s father calls for him to come down “when the rooms were warm”. Again, this could simply mean warm temperature-wise, but it could also mean warm emotionally.  We could infer that the speaker’s father used to try to keep the image of a happy family in tact for his son. However, we could also infer that the father tried to provide physical warmth as a substitution for the emotional warmth that he knew wasn’t possible, and that the son only realized what his father was trying to do as an adult. 

The third stanza returns to having 5 lines and has a stronger tone of guilt than the rest of the poem. The speaker recalls how he spoke “indifferently” to the father “who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well”.  The cold he mentions here could be cold weather, but could also mean coldness within the family. The word “driven” implies that keeping the house warm was not an easy task. The speaker recognizes that his father took care of him inside the home and out. By mentioning the polished shoes, the speaker shows that his father cared about how his son presented himself to the world. He wanted him to be happy at home, but well prepared for when he had to leave. Since polishing shoes could be seen as a woman’s job, there is an indication that the father was playing two roles at once. The speaker never realized this until the present, where he laments “what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?”. The contrast between “love” and words like “austere” , “lonely”, and “offices” brings light to the fact that love is sometimes a thankless job. We think of love as a beautiful emotion, not as a job to be done, but the reality is that love requires work and is not always repayed. “Office” might also be interpreted as “position”, and in this poem, the position is that of the father. Just as the President is an important office for the nation, the father is an important office in the family. We know that the father did manual labor during the week, so perhaps he regarded his parental role as his “real job” that brought him satisfaction. The father in the poem worked tirelessly for his family, but as we saw in the first stanza, no one ever thanked him. As an adult, who has likely begun to experience love’s lonely offices, the speaker understands the magnitude of what his father did for him. 

One thing that was difficult during this analysis was avoiding context. For example, I wanted to point out how getting up on Sunday has religious meaning if one is Christian or Jewish. But, I decided not to bring it up because the idea didn’t come from the text itself. I also wanted to know more about the author but refrained from googling him so that I would not be tempted to include autobiographical information.  I also struggled with whether or not I should talk about reader response when discussing the cold imagery. That seems as though it would be more formalist as every reader is different, however, it is unlikely that there will be much variation in responses to imaged of bitter cold.