What is real love? Do you show it by doing things for them? In his poem “These Winter Sundays” Robert Hayden uses imagery, poetic diction, and repetition to explore the theme of you do things for the ones you love because you love them.
He uses imagery describing the cold tells the reader what his father has to face to warm the house, he follows up the description of the cold with talking about his father’s hands- “and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, / then with cracked hands that ached” he shows his father’s love and care (2 + 3). This quotation is an example of imagery because Robert describes the cold with “Blueblack” then refers to the ache in his hands. After that Robert describes the fire by saying “I’d …show more content…
In the last line of the poem “of love’s austere and lonely offices?” Robert closes out the poem using austere which means severe and strict in manner (14), attitude, or appearance, or in terms of a living condition means having no comforts or luxuries. The use of austere in line 14 brings a new attitude to a man warming the house for his family. In another line in the poem Robert says “fearing the chronic angers of the house” then says “speaking indifferently to him” which tells the reader that the living conditions are not ideal by talking about how he’s spoken to and the angers of the house and the father is not treated as well as he should be. This shows that the father really loves his family because he doesn’t get thanks for his work on warming the house, because he loves them he doesn’t need thanks. The way the writer chooses his words in this poem is a form of art in it’s own way, the use of austere is a prime example of this it enhances the poem’s message and portrays to the reader what his father is feeling.
“These Winter Sundays” uses repetition to show the theme of the poem in paragraph 1 and Robert’s hindsight on his father doing this. There is only one example of repetition in this poem it is “what did I know, what did I know” this repetition shows Robert’s emotions looking back on this. He wonders what did he know of love’s austere and lonely offices? This proves that his father did this out of love because he knew that his family will remember how he loved them. This is an example of repetition due to it repeating “what did I know”.