Those winter sundays when was it written

It could mean that sternly scolds his son from time to time or that arguments are commonplace in the household. It seems clear, though, that he is a good father.

He accomplishes his Sunday tasks with aching, skin-cracked hands subjected during the week to the fierce cold he endures on the job. The adult speaker regrets now that he never took the time to thank his father for his concern and love. Language and Style. Robert Hayden enables the reader to picture the cold in the home of the poem's speaker. It is "blueblack," like a frozen cadaver. Ascribing color to a feeling coldness is a figure of speech called synesthesia.

This trope is only one of the rhetorical tricks the author employs in "Those Winter Sundays. In line 6, splintering and breaking aptly suggest the sound of wooden floors reacting to temperature and humidity changes.

There is an implied metaphor here that compares the sounds of the house to the sounds of ice breaking up. It is a way of solving for the unknowns. And in each stanza, there are hints of a cold, distant relationship between father and son which is never really reconciled.

The speaker is quite helpless in this questioning present, conditioned by the fears from past household experiences. This free verse poem has only 14 lines and is split into three stanzas, each with a poignancy that builds up to the final two lines. 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. This poem could be an extract from a diary, told to someone close, perhaps another family member of a future generation.

The speaker gives us an intimate insight into just what Sunday mornings were like for him as a child. Issues surface that the speaker wasn't aware of back in the day. This combination, together with unusual syntax and a dash of alliteration weekday weather, banked fires blaze , tends to create a mix of music not altogether harmonious, again a reflection of the atmosphere within the home.

So the main theme of the poem is that of parental sacrifice and duty. Do these amount to love? Even if the relationship isn't ideal, even if the father isn't related by blood, there's still a bond between two individuals. The only thing is, it takes years for this bond to be acknowledged by the child. Picture the child in that rather forbidding household as the father, given no word of thanks, prepares his shoes for Sunday church. Only upon looking back at these memories as an adult does he understand the often selfless and thankless nature of love.

Sundays too my Speaking indifferently to What did I Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

Hayden's Childhood — A brief interview segment that mentions Hayden's upbringing. A Reading by Hayden — The poem read by the poet himself.

I try, but cannot remember the wisdom of fourteen years, the pleasures of that discovery. Eron smiles. At the stove, we wash up as the sun dies in a candle-flame. A light breeze tears the first leaves of autumn from boughs that slowly darken. A squirrel, enraged, castigates the dog for some inscrutable intrusion, and Eron climbs the ladder to her loft.

Suddenly I am utterly alone, I am a child gazing up at a father, a father looking down at his daughter. A strange shudder comes over me like a chill. Is this what there is to remember — the long days roofing coops, the building of rooms on a cabin, the in significant meal? The shadows of moments mean everything and nothing, the dying landscapes of remembered human faces freeze into a moment.

My room was in the basement, was knotty pine, back there, in diamondback country. The night swings over the cold Pacific. I pour a cup of coffee, heavy in my bones. Soon, this fine young woman will stare into the face of her own son or daughter, the years gone suddenly behind her. Will she remember only the ache, the immense satisfaction of that longing?

May she be happy, filled with the essential, working in the twilight, on her knees, at autumn equinox, gathering the stories of silence together, preparing to meet the winter. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets.