Those Winter Sundays Essay

The Unspoken Love in “Those Winter Sundays”
Robert Hayden was one of the most celebrated poets of his days; he was the first African-American to serve as the nation’s official poet, a distinct honor that is now called the U.S. Poet Laureate (poets.org). Among his enduring works, “Those Winter Sundays” stands out as one of the utmost anthologized poem. In fact, ten years ago, on a survey conducted by Columbia University Press, it ranked the 266th most anthologized poem in the English language (Biespiel). In my opinion, if they were to repeat the survey today, it would probably still rank the same or better. ”Those Winter Sundays” is a fascinating masterpiece; Hayden’s words -carefully chosen- explicitly state certain meaning, but they also imply so much more without directly stating. To the reader is like looking at an old photograph; at first glance, there are only people and figures, but as one continue to gaze, memories start to come back to mind and feelings start to emerge. After gazing at “Those
Winter Sundays”, I feel the speaker’s regret of unspoken love to his father, and my own regret of unspoken love to my mother. As we grow older, our worldview is altered through life experiences and maturity, and oftentimes, we look back at certain point in our lives and wish we had known then what we know now. However, it helps to know that every experience positive or not contributes to our self-growth.
The first line of the poem, “Sundays too my father got up early” (1); establishes a first person speaker whom I believe is a male.
There is usually a special connection between a father and a daughter, and females tend to be more expressive than males. The dominant feeling that we get from the poem, it is the feeling of regret from an adult child for not showing love and gratitude towards his father. After reaching adulthood and maturity, the speaker looks back at this childhood relationship with his progenitor. Two simple words “Sundays too” connotes two different things. First, just the word “Sundays” implies that the father’s activities are sore of unusual for the day. Traditionally “Sundays” are days of rest, separated for the family and worship, and to take a break from the monotonous weekly routine. Second, the tiny work “too” tell us that Monday through Saturday, the father also got up early to fulfill his responsibilities and provide for his family
(339).
In the next four liners, we learned about their low economic status:
…and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze. Non one ever thanked him. (2-5)
The father is a blue-collar worker whose hands are cracked from the extenuating physical work he had to perform outside in the bitter cold. The fact that someone in the family had to build a fire to warm the house and that there was no central heating are also indications that the family was unprosperous.
Furthermore, the poet shows his present sympathy for his father’s past deeds, from the point of view of an adult remembering and not from the perspective of a child observing his father. For he tells us “No one ever thanked him,” revealing that others members of the family were also unappreciated of the father. In the second stanza, the attention is shifted to the speaker’s feelings and view of his life at that time: I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, And slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house. (6-9)
We can see the father’s act of going out in the harsh weather to create a safe and “warm” environment for his family which is a symbolic act of love. But we also see the apprehension and fear that they boy felt towards his father.
Hayden does not explain the “chronic angers of that house”; but, one can speculate that the father was not a happy man. Perhaps, he was tired all time or in physical pain due to the long house of work. The speaker never mention a maternal figure in the house. It is possibly that the mom was sick or that they had divorced, and the father felt all the burden of providing and raising a family on his own. Whatever the case might be, it prevented the from expressing his love to his and it prevented the son from getting closer to his father. In the last stanza, the author expresses the deep regret for how he feels behave with his father. He recalls: Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? (10-14)