Those Winter Sundays Tone

Robert Hayden uses tone shift in “Those Winter Sundays” to showcase the complexity of parenting styles and how easy miscommunication can be caused between parent and child. This is done through the speaker's perspective of childhood and how his father influenced his experience in his youth. By shifting from a regretful to an enlightening yet reminiscent tone, we see how our speaker misunderstood his father’s expression of love and why it was misinterpreted. Towards the beginning of the poem, a regretful tone is shown from the speaker who feels guilty for the way he treated his father in his childhood. It;s used to demonstrate how our speaker misunderstood his father’s expression of love. This is shown when the speaker expresses that “no one

This phrase is used to show his acknowledgement of the way he treated his father, knowing that it was wrong. The use of the word “ever” creates the assumption that his father should’ve been thanked, but never was, creating that regretful tone. Using this tone throughout the beginning of the poem expresses how as a child, the speaker didn’t understand his father’s style of showing love and therefore unappreciated him. Additionally, it conveys a common issue between parent and child where a parent’s well-meaning action goes unrecognized due to a misunderstanding coming from the child, causing emotional disconnect on both ends of the spectrum and causing this feeling of sorrow later in life. “Those Winter Sundays” gives us the perspective of a child which is commonly left out when dealing with conflict including a parent. This connects to our thematic topic because it shows the disconnect and the feeling of regret that

As this epiphany dawns on our speaker, he asks the rhetorical question, “what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (line 13-14) As a child, the speaker only felt that love was portrayed in one way, through words of affirmation and warm gestures, when in some realities, it’s shown through “austere and lonely offices.” The acts his father performed were often selfless, yet quiet. He showed his love through actions such as “polish[ing] [his son’s] good shoes” (line 12) and even working on Sundays to provide for the family. These acts are silent and become normalized, therefore they go unnoticed. Our speaker notices this as he reminisces on his childhood further, creating an enlightening tone. This is important because it connects further to the overarching theme about how love can easily be misinterpreted due to how complex showing love is, especially from a parental perspective. While the parent showed love the only way he knew how, the speaker didn’t receive it properly because he didn’t recognize it as it was meant to be. This reveals how with time and wisdom, we often see where we misunderstood something so important such as our parent’s love, and recognize how that truly impacted our view of those people in our early and later life. While it was no fault of