Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

First published: 1962, in A Ballad of Remembrance

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Those Winter Sundays” is a short lyric in which the speaker remembers a moment in his childhood and thinks about the sacrifices his father made for him then. This split or double perspective of the poem provides its power, for the poem’s meaning depends upon the differences between what the boy knew then and what the man—a father himself, perhaps—knows now.

The poem begins abruptly. The second word of the first line, “too,” in fact, assumes actions that have gone before—that the father got up early on other days as well as Sundays to help his family. In this first stanza the reader learns about the father rising in the cold to heat the house before the rest of his family gets up. The last line of the stanza contains the first hint of one of the poem’s central themes: “No one ever thanked him.”

In the second stanza, the narrator recalls waking as the cold, like ice, was “splintering, breaking” as a result of his father’s having lit a wood fire to warm the house. And “slowly” he would get up and dress—in the stanza’s last and the poem’s most difficult line—“fearing the chronic angers of that house.” At this point the reader can only guess at the source of those angers. The third and final stanza continues the actions of the narrator, who speaks “indifferently” to the father who has worked so early and so hard to heat the house for his family and has “polished my good shoes as well.” It is Sunday, and probably the boy and his father (and other unnamed family members) are going to church.

In the concluding couplet of the poem, the adult narrator, who has been implied throughout the poem, suddenly steps forward with his final poignant question, “what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?” If the body of the poem deals with the gap between the father and his son, the poem’s focus in the last two lines is clearly on the gap between the boy, so indifferent to the father’s sacrifices then, and the adult narrator who in his repetition of the question—almost like some incantatory prayer—reveals the pain this memory holds for him: “What did I know, what did I know…?” I was a child then, the couplet implies, and I did not realize what it means to be a man, a father, and to perform the “austere and lonely” duties that family love demands. I never thanked my father, and I cannot today.

The last stanza, and especially those concluding two lines, hardly resolve the tensions of the poem. Rather, the reader is only now fully aware of the real conflicts the poem has described—not only between the indifferent child and the hard-working father, but between the narrator as a boy and the man he has become, who now knows what he missed as a young child. “Those Winter Sundays” is a poem without resolution, a poem with its pains redoubled rather than resolved. The speaker’s final question,“What did I know?” can only elicit the answer “nothing” from the reader. In addition, the mystery of line 9 about the “chronic angers of that house” remains unsolved. Are these the angers of any house with young children? Are they only the angers that result from dragging reluctant children to church? The reader cannot be certain.

Forms and Devices

“Those Winter Sundays” is a fairly direct and accessible short lyric. Its language is clear and precise, its metaphors are those of everyday life, and its metrics present no particular difficulties. The form of the poem fits its content closely, and the poem’s power comes from this almost perfect fusion.

One interesting thing about the poem is that it is fourteen lines long; poems of such a length are usually called sonnets, but Hayden’s poem—instead of having an octave and a sestet, or three quatrains and a concluding couplet, as most conventional sonnets do—violates the sonnet form by having three almost identical stanzas of five, four, and five lines. Yet the spirit of the sonnet form (which often poses and then tries to answer a question or problem) lies beneath the poem’s lines in this three-part structure. The first five lines describe the father’s actions, the next seven the boy’s response (or lack of response) to those actions, and the concluding two the final agonizing question that the narrator, now grown himself, is left with. Thus the sense, if not the structure, of the sonnet form is replicated in “Those Winter Sundays.”

Even more noticeable than the stanzaic form of the poem is its language. Rarely in such a short lyric do readers find such intense imagery. The “blueblack cold” of the second line evokes a picture of ice, which is “splintering, breaking” four lines later. The cold is rendered vividly in such an extended image. Likewise the “cracked hands” of line 3 imply that the father is a laborer of some sort, which makes his work for his family even more difficult: His hands are already roughened by his efforts to support his family; now, every morning, they suffer more from working in the freezing cold. The alliteration of the repeated k sounds in the poem—“blueblack cold,” “cracked,” “ached,” “banked,” “thanked,” and so on—reinforces the discomfort. (At the same time, the assonance and internal rhyme of the poem soften this harshness somewhat.)

Finally the poem’s last line, “offices,” reverberates with meaning. An office is a job, a duty, but it also carries the idea of a form or service of religious worship, and that sense clearly exists in the poem. Family love demands “austere and lonely offices” (austere denoting ascetic self-denial), for a family member’s actions may never earn any kind of acknowledgment. And yet, as in any religious service, family love also carries a spiritual and transcendent meaning—and it is, after all, Sunday morning when the poem’s actions take place.

Bibliography

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