Those Winter Sundays Literary Devices

"Those Winter Sundays" is a poem written by Robert Hayden in 1962 and is one of the author's most well-known works. The poem is an emotional piece that describes the nature of a relationship between a distant father and his son. Although the poem seems like a simple fourteen lines, this work is a personal reflection of an adult sharing their memories of childhood. In "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden, the poem has a theme of love and reflection, and regret. This is supported by Hayden's usage of tone, the combination of consonance and alliteration, imagery, metaphor, and rhetorical question, working to create a poem around understanding parental sacrifice and appreciation of love in many forms. These literary devices add to the poem by

The first device to point out is the use of consonance and alliteration to create the feeling of inhospitality in the home environment. When reading, auditory cues are the precursor to visual images in the reader's brain. Although subtle and often missed, when reading the poem aloud the repetition of the hard "C" soud is notable. For example, "blueblack cold" in line 2 and "cracked hands that ached" in line 3 add to the harsh undertones and the rigidity the child felt in the household. The use of consonance also serves a secondary purpose in Hayden's work. The overall poem has no rhyme, but the use of consonance creates cohesion within the writing and enables the lines to flow

In the first line of the second stanza, Hayden describes cold as a physical object, something that can be splintered and broken. He also gives the feeling of cold a color, reiterating to the reader's senses the depth of frigidness that the author experienced during that period. In the first line of the third stanza, Hayden uses the metaphor of his father who had "driven out the cold" which is a visual representation of a fathers devotion to his son. The metaphor of driving out the cold exemplifies the acts of love disguised as daily tasks that Hayden did not recognize as