Robert Hayden's Those Winter Sundays
Retrospective Appreciation of a Father’s Stern Affection
Feb 16, 2009
Taking inspiration from Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and from his teacher W.H. Auden, Hayden writes in the voice of a son, who looks back on a father’s quietly beneficent acts and offers up appreciation not previously recognized or expressed.
Subject Overview
Hayden’s speaker is a man, who looks back on childhood memories, when his father rose before dawn to build warming fires. With the inclusion of the introductory phrase, “Sundays too”, Hayden indicates that while his father had the day off and could have continued to sleep, he did not. Instead, he confronted the cold in order to chase it away. The task required effort and may have involved discomfort, if not pain. From hard weekday labor, the man’s hands ache and his skin is cracked, Hayden tells the reader. Hayden closes this five-line stanza with the frank declaration that no one ever thanked the man for these efforts.
In the second four-line stanza, the speaker acknowledges his experience as a boy, waking to hear the effect of the fire’s warmth on the house, which he describes as an audible noise of “splintering, breaking”, an image that recalls the cracking of ice.
The father does not rouse the boy immediately or force him to face the same cold darkness he did. The father waits until the rooms are warm, which is another distinct kindness. Still, at the end of this second stanza, the speaker indicates that he would dress slowly, aware (and fearful) of the “chronic angers of the house.” He does not specifically indicate what the angers relate to or to whom they are attributable, but the inclusion tacitly implicates the father. It is an image that suggests the memory of past eruptions and perhaps mental apparitions of rages that might unexpectedly flair again. In declaring them to be persistent, the reader can intuit that they somehow relate in part to the father's endless hard labor and, very likely, the stresses of poverty.
By the final five-line stanza, the speaker declares that his usual response to his father was, he feels now, ungrateful indifference. In the final line, he indicates that love sometimes expresses itself unobtrusively, through actions rather than demonstrative expression. At the time, he felt only the negative energy that resided in the house and not of the effort his father went to in order to warm the house and polish his shoes. What is not directly stated, but clearly implied is that the speaker, now an adult himself, better understands the plights of adulthood and the exertions his father completed for his son’s comfort.
Hayden’s Background as Potential Source
Hayden, born into the Detroit slums in 1913, was eventually given over to a foster family, following the separation of his parents’, Ruth and Asa Sheffey. Hayden was just 18 months old. According to his own childhood accounts, he was subject to regular beatings by foster parents Sue Ellen Westerfield and William Hayden.
If, in fact, the poem is autobiographical and the father to whom he refers is William Hayden, the poet does not condemn him for the beatings that, by his own admission, lead Hayden into periods of depression. Instead, he gives the man credit for his kind deeds, which he consistently performed despite the fact that they went unappreciated.
Poetic Devices
While it is considered a sonnet, with the traditional 14 lines, its standards are less rigid than the Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnets. While there is iambic pentameter, particularly in the first few lines, it does not consistently follow through the entire poem, and consequently, the lines to lack a reliable rhythm. Hayden, however, is writing the sonnet in the period when free verse is on the ascendancy. Free verse changed approaches to poetry and permitted the reinterpretation and loosening of conventionally stringent poetic standards.
Hayden also deftly, almost furtively includes both internal rhymes (‘blueblack’ and ‘cracked’, ‘banked’ and ‘thanked’) and hidden alliterations (the ‘k’ sounds of ‘ached’, ‘cracked’, ‘weekday,’ ‘blueblack’, for example). Even if registered unconsciously, these seem to mimic the sounds of the crackling fire the father builds.
Hayden, who became the first African American Poet Laureate, sketches a portrait of an austere father-son relationship in Those Winter Sundays. Alluding to realities beyond the poem’s borders, Hayden indicates that the father may be burdened and aloof and the son persistently wary. However, via a loosely interpreted sonnet format, which is influenced by free verse’s liberating standards, the father’s love is recognized and confirmed in his habitual kindnesses and exertions.
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