Those Winter Sundays Figurative Language

Poetry often allows readers to identify complex issues through the underlying idea or theme. Robert Hayden, Sylvia Plath, and Shakespeare vividly express their perspectives through the theme of love, providing readers with various outlooks into their individual perceptions of love. For instance, Hayden conveys his conflicting feelings of love towards his foster father. As a young child Hayden perceived his father as cold and grim. However, as an adult he becomes fully aware of the sacrifices his father made for him as a child in the name of love. Similarly, Plath professes her unresolved feelings about her daddy’s domineering love. Frequently, Plath identifies herself as a victim of his venomous affection, one in which she can not escape through

However, Hayden and Plath evoke dark, somber, and negative images and emotions throughout their text using tone and figurative language. Hayden uses symbolism to illustrate his disharmonious relationship between himself and his father. In “Those Winter Sundays” Hayden’s father warms the house with his “blueback cold … cracked hands” (lines 2 and 3) to create an atmosphere of warmth. The icy temperatures, inside and outside, of Hayden’s home reflect his cutting, frigid feelings towards his father. The neologism, “blueblack”, truly captures the essence of the cold, early Sunday mornings his father suffers at the expense of his son’s well-being. In lines fourteen and fifteen Hayden writes, “What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?”: these lines define his father’s Sunday sacrifices. “The religious connotations of the final word, offices, elevate the father’s devoted service to his family - as depicted throughout the poem - to the level of worship” (Hatcher, para 4). Likewise, Plath uses similes and metaphors to effectively represent the negative relationship between her father and herself. Throughout “Daddy” Plath gradually assumes the role of a Jew through poetic identification and illustrates her father as an extreme Nazi, vampire, and devil. Plath writes, “I begin to talk like a Jew/ I think I may well be a Jew/ … I may be a bit of a Jew” (lines 34-35 and 40) to metaphorically demonstrate her father’s vitriolic will cowering over her innocent being. Correspondingly, Shakespeare uses antithesis in the last two lines of Sonnet 116 to strengthen his individual conviction to the ideal he describes. Shakespeare’s confidence lies in the final couplet: “If this be error and upon me proved,/ I never writ, nor no man ever loved” (lines 13 and 14). More simply, if Shakespeare mistook his interpretation of true love, then he did not write and no other being ever loved