Those Winter Sundays Tone

In Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”, a grown person, most likely a man, recounts the winter Sundays of his childhood and the sadness of lost opportunities to develop bonding ties between father and child. The man realizes that as a child he failed to appreciate the hard work his father did in order to provide the basic necessities. The word choice that Robert Hayden uses is not complex, which requires little effort to read and is easily understandable. However, if one were to explicate this poem, it proves to be a complex piece with a well-defined sentiment of the conflict between unrecognized love and regret. Hayden’s diction helps communicate the underlying tone of the story. Imagery plays a major role in this poem. The speaker, who

The word also could be substituted for too; and since the father did this on Sunday, this implies that this was the father’s routine every other day of the week as well. This line also informs the reader that the father always arose early. In the following line, the reader imagines the father dressing before dawn in extreme cold as evidence by the author’s choice of the wording “blueblack cold.” The reader can sympathize with the father as one pictures the aching, cracked hands from apparently manual labor everyday in harsh conditions. In the last line of the first stanza, the author describes the father’s thankless job of starting all the early morning fires in order to warm the house for his sleeping family. The author used alliteration when he wrote that the father “made banked fires blaze” to describe his ritual of starting the fires to warm the house. The plurality of the word fires indicates he had to establish more than one fire to light the house. This chore was performed daily without any words of thanks or appreciation. The writer realized sometime later that the father had never been thanked for all of the hard work he did in and outside the house for his

In the second stanza, the child describes the early morning wake up call from the father when the house was warm and toasty. The child would “wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.” The child lay there awake and could feel the cold air escaping as the warm air seeped in to replace it; and would slowly rise out of bed to dress. The last line of stanza two indicates an undercurrent of tension in the house that apparently goes unexpressed as the writer pens these words “fearing the chronic angers of that house.” The word chronic indicates this condition of anger or tension has been going on for sometime. Often times the house itself seems to take on the characteristics of the household members. The author never specifies whether the house is diseased or the people living inside it is never told. Whatever the circumstances, the child feels that