Note on Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays"

Source: "`Those Winter Sundays'," in Poetry for Students, Vol. 1, Gale Research, 1997.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center
Copyright (c) 2001 by Gale Group . All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.

Robert Hayden possessed amazing skill with language and the structure of the poem. Though he is perhaps best known for his poems that explore and express the African-American experience, from the days of slavery, to the Civil War, to that of his own time, poems like Middle Passage, or The Ballad of Nat Turner, he also wrote shorter, arguably more lyric poems that capture personal or religious moments. "Those Winter Sundays," a poem about a son remembering his father, is an excellent example of one of these shorter poems as it displays Hayden's incredible control of language and intricate understanding of human experience. It is clear that there was distance between them and little communication or even warmth. It is discovered though, in recollection, that love actually was present. It was just communicated subtly in the father's effort, specifically by building fires in the early morning that "dr[ove] out the cold." The poem seems to be a lament of the fact that the son, who at the time could not perceive such subtle expressions of love, never returned them. Though subjects and speakers of poems do not necessarily correlate with the poet who writes them, it is interesting to note that Hayden was not actually raised by his real mother and father, but by their neighbors to whom he was given at the age of eighteen months.

The poem begins with a very simple line that nonetheless establishes the subject and the tone of what will follow. The title has already suggested the quiet cold of "winter Sundays" and this first line adds to it the notion of the early morning. The speaker's father is also introduced which leads one to believe that he will figure centrally in the poem. The simple action of the man getting up and dressing is sharpened as an image by the use of the interesting and striking adjective "blueblack," which describes a darkness that will soon be contrasted by the image of fire. This beginning might also be seen to suggest something of the father's character as well, as he is up before daybreak, and is the one to confront the cold darkness of the home.

The father's effort and suffering are then focused upon. His hands, a particularly human reference, are dry and pained from weekday work. Yet this is not enough to keep him from the necessary task of making a fire. The element of self-sacrifice is clear in this description as the man disregards his own pain to warm and light the home for his family. The first stanza comes to a close with a quiet but surprising admission: "no one ever thanked him." This addition seems to further the implied isolation of the father as we learn that his suffering and effort go unacknowledged by the others. This last line also adds the element of lament or regret on the part of the speaker to the poem as it shifts from the father to the son and anonymous others.

This first stanza also serves as an excellent example of Hayden's meticulous skill with language. Notice the sounds that he compiles as he tells the beginning of this simple story. He first establishes the cold dark with "blueblack." Then, consistent with the sound of a hard "c," he adds the element of pain: "cracked hands that ached." When certain consonant sounds repeat in close proximity it is called consonance and its use here is part of what holds the stanza together. The sounds are very subtle, but as each new hard "c" is uttered, it evokes some recollection of those that came before. So as one continues through the first stanza and hears "weekday," "banked," and "thanked," the poem coheres almost without notice. It could also be argued that this hard "c" was chosen to resemble the sound of a fire just starting, the cracking and popping of the dry wood. Finally, Hayden uses alliteration, the repetition of words beginning with the same consonant sound, with "weekday weather" and "banked fires blazed" to add to the smoothness of the lines and their sound.

Here, as the focus shifts to the speaker's role in this Sunday morning experience, the consonance continues. Though it is described as the speaker hearing the "cold splintering, breaking," the sounds continue to carry the connotation and sound of the fire started in the first stanza. The image of the fire affecting the cold also begins the progression from dark and cold to light and warm that seems to flow through the poem.

Here, once warmth is established, the father calls to the son, who then performs the same act as the father in lines one and two by rising and dressing. This could be seen as a parallel between the two, to make a subtle connection that adds weight to the speaker's lament. It is possible, the parallel suggests, that the speaker has come to understand this childhood experience by eventually finding himself in the role of the father.

The second stanza then ends as the first did with an unexpected and powerful line. The idea of "chronic angers" is introduced into the calm scene in which the father makes the house warm and comfortable for his family. More specific information is not offered however, and the reader is left to guess who the source of the anger is, and what its causes might be. It is clear though that anger was a constant in the house, as much a part of the mornings as the fire itself. Hayden uses another hard "c" sound to express this, with the word "chronic," which connects this idea of anger to the earlier description of the fathers painful hands, and the fire blazing. One could argue that this introduces complexity psychological and structural that makes the poem much more accurate a description of such familial interaction.

The third and final stanza begins with an image of emotional distance. This seems a fairly natural extension of the previous line's mention of the presence of anger in the house. The next two lines, however, imply that as much as the indifference may have been self-protective, it was also ungrateful. There is no judgment made about whether or not the indifference was justified, or could have been helped. There is only the admission that, in addition to possibly being the source of "chronic angers," the father also tended to his child. The images offered are clear and strong as first we are reminded of the building of the fire which drives out the cold, and then are given the more austere and sharper image of the man polishing shoes. Both of these images carry the connotations of the actions of a servant more than a father.

After establishing the complex emotional sense of the remembered ritual, the speaker poses a striking rhetorical question that will end the poem. Line 13 provides, with an almost pleading repetition, the admission of ignorance on the part of the speaker. Then Line 14 reveals what it is that the speaker was ignorant about, what he has discovered looking back on those mornings. It is the nature of love, more specifically the love of the father. The first key adjective to offer insight into this is "austere." This means simple, or unadorned, but also removed from the ideas of pleasure. All of this we see in the description of the father who neglects his own comfort and confronts the cold and pain of his hands, in order to foster the comfort of his family. The second adjective, "lonely," then adds to this the element of isolation, which the father experienced each morning as he built the fire.

All of this seems to point to the fact that when the speaker was young he doubted his father's love; as a child he assumed love was expressed in certain, more obvious ways. It is not until the speaker has grown significantly older that he realizes that love is often expressed silently and indirectly, and he is then able to recognize it in the early morning gestures of his father. Though there is still a sadness at the end of the poem, a lament for the opportunity to thank the father, or treat him better, there is also a feeling of resolution. It is as if homage is being paid finally in the making of the poem.