Those Winter Sundays

Those Winter Sundays is a poem written in 1962 by American author Robert Hayden, while he was teaching as an English professor at Fisk University. This poem is one of Hayden's most recognised works, together with another poem entitled The Middle Passage.

The poem is about a son that expresses remembrance of his father, realizing that despite their distance there was love between the two. The author's words suggest that the son feels sorrowful and recognizes he never returned his father's love.

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden
Written	1962
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject(s)	Family and Personal Relationships
Genre(s)	Poetry
Form	Three Stanzas

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Themes

The main focus of this poem is the love of parents for their children, but this kind of love can be easily missunderstood by the latters, as it isn't about being kind and say lovely words but instead are all the sacrifices that parents do for love providing their soons the neccesary for leaving and whatever they are able to supply. It often happens that this can pass unnoticed to the children because they give evrything for granted, but they will figure that out once they will be grown up. The poem reflects how Robert Hayden's perspective of his father's love has changed, and his understanding of it has actually gotten deeper by years gone by.

Title

As far as titles go, “Those Winter Sundays” feels a bit old and worn to us. It’s like the speaker is looking back on those dark, chilly Sundays, many moons ago, when he was just a sad wee lad.

There's also a definite sense of repetition here. There wasn’t just one cold winter Sunday that the speaker and his family lived though. There were probably hundreds of them. And they were all equally wintry.

And those winter Sundays don’t exactly seem joyous. In fact, they sound like a huge drag. We feel like the speaker says the title with a big sigh. Those winter Sundays may have been important to the speaker, but not because they were filled with hot cocoa and cheery times by the fire. Just the opposite is true, actually. He remembers them for their coldness and their quiet

Symbols

One of the main symbols with which the poem is concerned with is the symbol of temperature. At the beginning, it makes the reader aware of the cold temperature through the use of words such as "blueblack cold". However, soon in the poem it becomes warm and words such as "fires blaze" enhance this image. This represents the difference in temperature outside and inside the house reflecting the author’s relationship with his father, Robert Hayden's father. The relationship with his father is a cold relationship as he does not see his father as a warm and cheerful man. The image of cold also evokes solitude and emotional distance.

The sentence, "No one ever thanked him" summarises the main idea of the poem itself: the way the father works to keep the family safe and warm without any appreciation. Another symbol found in the poem is the symbol of the "good shoes". As the titles reminds us, it is a Sunday, a religious day. This shows how the father cares about his appearance like he cares about keeping his family warm and protected. The author tells the readers that his father had "driven out the cold", an image which evokes a shepherd's behaviour with his herd. This can be linked to the idea of the Good Shepherd, a biblical reference.

Structure

Those Winter Sundays contains 14 lines in 3 Stanza. This lets it look like a typical Sonnet even though it isn't, it neither has a rhyme nor a regular iambic pentameter. Looking at the first line in matter of metrical pattern, you see that it hasn't got one. In comparison the second line in in a metrical pattern. Both lines are 10 syllables long. The third line does not come close to this and it doesn't have a rhyme. If you have a look on the words blueblack and cracked, the ck sounds are outstanding, this repeating of ck is a consonance. All this Soundplays are a big poetic device.

There are two internal rhymes, "splintering, breaking" in line 5 and "banked, thanked" in line 6. Then there are two alliterations, "Weekday weather" line 4 and "When the rooms where warm" line 7. Furthermore there is a Repetition in line 13 "What did I know". And last but not least there a several imagerys like "Blueblack cold" line 2 and "Cracked hands that ached" line 3.And in the lines 2-5 the author uses cacophony.

Style

“Those Winter Sundays” is characterized by the typical elements of a Sonnet. There are fourteen lines, and these are divided into three different stanzas of five, four, and five lines respectively. Most of the lines are not in iambic pentameter but they are as long as the lines of classical sonnets. Hayden, using a synesthesia, allows the reader to picture the speaker’s house into a cold environment throughout the word "blueblack," which allude to the image of a frozen corpse.