Those Winter Sundays Poem Analysis

In analyzing poetry there has to be a connection between the author and the reader, in order to understand what the author is trying to express through his/her work. The reader’s needs to be able to read between the lines. Tone and mood help the reader identify what the poem is trying to convey. To do this we need to figure out who the speaker is, and the relationship the speaker has with his/her family. We will be depicting “Those Winter Sundays,” “Digging,” “Dusting,” and “My Grandmother Would Rock quietly and hum” searching for these qualities.

In “Those Winter Sundays” the speaker is an adult male recalling of his past, his childhood, and his relationship with his father. Throughout the poem there relationship is carried out as cold and

The speaker is proud of his family, but does not feel that writing is as important to what his father did, digging. He writes, “By God the old man could handle a spade / Just like his old man/ my grandfather cut more turf in a day/ Than any other man on Toner’s bog.”(15-18), this shows how his old man, his father was just as well as his grandfather who he spoke very highly of, where no man could do more than him, he was proud. But he puts himself down, to not be as good as his father, when he says “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them” (28), as though he cannot live up to them because he is a

But as the poems continues we notice a problem with her memory, they were very much in love how although her memory was failing her that she still remembered her love with her husband. The speaker states “Not Michael” and “Wavery memory” (17/21), without certainty and the reason she is not sure. And the last stanza of the poem it states “That was years before/ Father gave her up/ with her name grew to mean/ Promise, then/ Desert-in-Peace”(29-34) to show their love story, where her father gave her up is when she got married , and her name grew to mean promise, to show the promise they made in getting married, and Desert-in Peace where she now is lonely without her husband but in peace because the life they lived.

Finally, “My grandmother would rock quietly and hum” the speaker is a young Mexican girl who is remembering her grandmother. They relationship seemed as any normal relationship of a grandmother to a grandchild. Throughout the poem it becomes notable that her grandmother died and the author is remembering her when she was alive. This is proven at the end of the poem where she states “to the old house/ worn spots by the stove/ echo of her shuffling/ and/ Mexico/ still hang in her fading calendar pictures” (47-54) as a walk through memory lane for the