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Those Winter Sundays Analysis Essay

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Look Back on Those Days Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” is a memoir for the speaker’s father. The writer is looking back on how grateful he should have been. His father showed him an unspoken love, but he did not realize his acts of labor were acts of love until later in life. The speaker has grown up and been apprised that his father was more caring than he thought. There was an underlying stress for the family to provide. An indication of poverty was introduced and that brings stress to any family. This poem is a reminder that society should take a step back and look at the importance of people in their life because they might be taking them for granted. The poem uses symbols and imagery that reiterates the way the speaker took his father’s constant giving for granted. The “banked fires blaze” shows how even the smallest acts were done to provide. The …show more content…

There is an intense empathy for the father while realizing all he sacrificed for the children. In the first stanza he thinks, “No one ever thanked him” (5). The appreciation was not acquired until later in life. Children are not perfect and are sometimes blind to the hardships their parents endure. Now that the author sees, he is reflecting on the past and appreciative. The speaker now sees that the anger and stress in the house was because of poverty and striving to meet needs. Reiterating the importance of the father, the speaker writes: “Sundays too my father got up early / and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold” (1-2). Empathy is embraced by enlightening the reader with imagery. The father getting up early on the only day he can rest. Even in the cold and in pain he was putting his family before himself. He was selfless and the speaker is now seeing that selflessness with a heart of empathy. The speaker was ungrateful and blind to the importance of his father’s graciousness and

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The narrator states that his father woke up and got dressed “in the blueblack cold” in order to go to work where he developed “cracked hands that ached.” Hayden uses the words “cold,” “cracked,” and “ached” to describe the father’s working conditions; the hard Cs in these words make them sound harsh, and therefore imply that the father’s job is difficult. This enhances readers’ impressions that the father continues to work at his challenging and demanding job in order to provide for his family. Both Hayden and Roethke chose to describe the fathers’ hands to represent the children’s living situations. The father in “Those Winter Sundays” had “cracked hands that ached,” while the father in “My Papa’s Waltz” had “battered” hands.

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