Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

This Robert Hayden poem is best know for its portrayal of a son's late understanding of his tough-loving father. Notice how Hayden uses sound to enhance the poem's content. The first stanza is loaded with alliteration (blueblack, weekday weather, banked fires blaze) and rhyme (black/cracked, ached/labor, banked/thanked), which highlights the hard, thankless labor, and also the anger, that Hayden is describing. As the house warms and the speaker comes to his realization, Hayden smoothes the music of the language accordingly.



Those Winter Sundays
By Robert Hayden

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.

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,

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?



Robert Hayden was raised in a poor neighborhood in Detroit. He had an emotionally tumultuous childhood and was shuttled between the home of his parents and that of a foster family, who lived next door. In 1976, he became the first black American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (later called the Poet Laureate). He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1980.