
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden is told by a person looking back on their childhood. He realizes and understands the significance his father had when he was younger. The speaker is being both the child having fear and not thanking his father, and the adult becoming aware of the love and respect he has for his dad. He realizes all the labor his father did out of care. Some were simple tasks, and others not so much. The speaker has gained a great amount of maturity since their childhood realizing why their father did all he did. The lack of understanding about who the speaker really is made the poem stand out to me. 

The poem is a non-rhythmic sonnet, consisting of 14 lines. The meter of “Those Winter Sundays” varies throughout the whole 3 stanzas. There is alliteration, assonance, consonance, and repetition in Hayden’s work. In the first line the second word, “too” is important because it implies that the speaker’s father did not only get up early on Sundays. His dad sacrificed a lot of sleep in my opinion because he was waking up before sunrise. Hayden uses consonance to give that edge in the second line with the word “blueblack”. Using colors, he refers to how cold and dark it was in the morning for the speaker’s father. With the rest of the first stanza we can tell that his father went through a good deal of labor. The author uses assonance with “ached” and “blaze” as well as alliteration with “banked”, “blaze”, and “weekday weather”, Hayden shows us that the speaker’s dad warmed up the house so his family didn’t have to get up in the cold. The speaker realizes that no one ever thanked his dad, it seems like he understands that he should’ve taken advantage of that when he could’ve. 

The second stanza starts off with the speaker talking about how he used to wake and hear the blueblack cold throughout the house break due to the warmth of the fires swallowing it. Once the cold shifted to warmth his father would get him up so he could take his time to get dressed. This is the exact opposite of what the father goes through on the daily. However, the speaker had fear while getting ready because the family or just his dad were unhappy. The word use of “chronic” points out that the anger had been there awhile.

In the final stanza we understand that the speaker spoke indifferently or poorly to his father. It’s possible he’s like this because of the kind of emotional relationship they have with each other. The next few lines show that the speaker knows he shouldn’t have spoken poorly to someone who did so much for him. His father killed the cold and shined his shoes, meaning he showed love in different ways, not all emotional. With Hayden’s use of repetition in line 13, he emphasizes the fact that the speaker didn’t know better when he was younger, and had matured in his understanding of love since. The last 2 lines are made up of the speaker’s regret. Love’s harsh and lonesome offices can be interpreted as emotions and responsibilities that the speaker’s dad conveyed and fulfilled for his child. This poem, “Those Winter Sundays” written by Robert Hayden makes it clear that love is about accountability.
