Those Winter Sundays Summary

“Those Winter Sundays,” is a poem, published in 1966, the author is Robert Hayden. The poem, in fifteen lines, recounts the memory of a person childhood. The speaker remembers the early morning events that took place and how much those events portrayed his father’s love for him. The man realizes that as a child, he failed to appreciate the hard work his father did in order to provide him with the necessities, like a roof over his head, warm place for him to sleep, and some small additional benefits too at times. The theme of the poem is sad, and lonely. The speaker is a man looking back on his childhood, a lonely childhood, and a child afraid of their father. The child associates the father with; “the chronic angers of that house” (line 9).

The verse starts with the child waking and hearing “the cold splintering, breaking” (line 6). The word choice Hayden used in this line helps a reader not only hear the splintering and breaking of icicles along with strong wind blowing against the house, but it also reinforces the type of climate the events of the poem are taking place in. The end of the next line the farther calls, making the reader remember their own childhood when their parent would nag them to get out of bed. At the beginning of the third section, the reader’s human sense of hearing is still in use. The reader gets an idea of the relationship between the two family members at the start of the third verse, when the son is speaking indifferently to the father, one cannot quite hear the words, however, can sense the confrontation between the two. Continuing into the second and third line of the last verse, the speakers use the reader’s sense of sight and touch one last time. When he describes some of the regrets he had by talking indifferently to his farther, especially once he notice the small choirs his farther already had taken care of, like his “good shoes being polished,” or after he notice the warmth of the