Speaker Reminices Back On The Foundation: Those Winter Sundays By Robert Hayden

Foundation
Perhaps the most influential people in any one person’s life would have to be either their mother or father, your parents. Parents are responsible for bringing you into this world and as they like to jokingly remind their children, they can take them right back out. It is the parents job to lay a strong foundation for their children so they are able to grow and flourish into successful adults. Everything a child sees and hears from their parents adds on to that foundation which will ultimately assist in molding that child into adult they will eventually become. This essay will analyze and discuss three separate works of literature where each speaker reminisces back on the foundation laid down by their parents and how it affected their

The first work of literature is the poem Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden. This poem is told by the speaker in present day and he is reflecting back on his father which leads to believe that the father is no longer around. It’s almost as if this poem is being told from two different perspectives, the speaker as a child and the speaker in present day. Ultimately the speaker had a turbulent relationship with his father as a child and this evident by the, “chronic angers of that house (Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” 13),” described by the speaker. While the speaker didn’t go into details about the house’s “chronic anger”, it can be interpreted that the father was causing the anger in the house, which would be evidence for their turbulent relationship. This also explains a line earlier in the poem when the speaker comes off as an ungrateful child for not thanking his father; “then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. (Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” 3-5).”