Unrecognized Love In 'Those Winter Sundays'

Jaime Mickey

Professor Sheffield

English 113

12 February 2017

Unrecognized Love within “Those Winter Sundays”

When it comes to love, there are many ways it can be expressed. Sometimes it is unrecognized and expressed in ways we don’t even realize. Hayden is someone who has experienced this when “a neighbor’s family adopted him at the age of two when his parents separated and his mother could no longer afford to keep him” (Biespiel). In the lyric poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, the speaker looks back to when he was a little boy and does not realize that all the actions his father was doing for him were simply out of the love he had for him. Being older now, he had come to a realization that as a young boy he had taken his father

Appreciativeness is overlooked because we only look at the surface reason of why things are being done. The speaker may have just looked at his father's actions as if they were just tasks that he should have been doing rather than knowing those tasks were done out of love. “As an adult the speaker has come to understand what regretfully had escaped him as a boy. Now he has learned to appreciate the form his father’s love had taken” (Landau). Despite a long, hard week of work, the speaker's father wakes up bright and early in the morning even though it is a Sunday to assure that his family is warm and cared for. The speaker never realized he should of been appreciative by the actions his father had

The poem begins bone chilling as it states “put his clothes on in the blueblack cold” to let the reader know that the cold is beyond just the sense of touch but so cold you would be able to see it as well. It then begins to warm up when the father begins lighting all the fires in the house for his family such as when it states “Banked fires blaze” (5). The speaker never realized how fortunate he was with a father like he had. “When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress” (7-8). He got to lay in bed as his father did all the work and he never thought anything of it. The warmness that filled the speakers room was a normality for him because of the work his father had put in each morning. This may have resulted in the speaker not appreciating the warm because he was not the one waking up early and dressing for the cold, but rather it was always warm when he awoke so he never knew how his father went through what he did. He had never taken the time to appreciate his father’s kind gestures because he did not truly understand. The poem then returns to cold once again by using personification when it says “fearing the chronic angers of the house (9). This shows the speaker experiences a feeling of dreadfulness having to go and speak with his