"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden

Robert Hayden was an American poet who was born in Detroit in 1913. He served as the first African American Poet Laureate from 1976-1978. He attended the University of Michigan with W. H. Auden, who proved to be a major influence on his work. His poetry took off on a national level in the 1960's. He wrote "Those Winter Sundays" in 1966.

          Sundays too my father got up early
          and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
          then with cracked hands that ached
          from labor in the weekday weather made
          banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

          I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
          When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
          and slowly I would rise and dress,
          fearing the chronic angers of that house,

          Speaking indifferently to him,
          who had driven out the cold
          and polished my good shoes as well.
          What did I know, what did I know
          of love’s austere and lonely offices?

            Robert Hayden, in his poem “Those Winter Sundays,” uses tone to express embarrassment and regret for how he treated his father during his youth. Hayden creates a narrative that is easily relatable to readers of all ages who, at one point in their adolescence showed contempt for their parents not because they are rotten or evil, but because they were ignorant of “love’s austere and lonely offices.” He creates a contrast in the first two stanzas between the narrator’s life and his father’s life. He uses diction such as “blueblack cold” and “cracked hands that ached” to create a sense of sympathy that he uses to create the tone of self-loathing in the rest of the poem. In the second stanza, the father’s dressing in the “blueblack cold” is contrasted by the narrator’s dressing in the warm house, a product of his father’s suffering in the first stanza. Set up by this contrast, the narrator laments his ignorance in the final stanza. Repetition of the phrase “what did I know” cements his tone towards his childhood folly.

            The ultimate goal of the tone that the narrator creates is to evoke sympathy with the reader for the father, and shame for the narrator, which may be relatable to some readers. The stance that the narrator is taking is that parents do things out of love which so often go unappreciated, and that in a larger sense, many things are done out of love which gain no recognition at all. We don’t do them because we want credit, we do them simply out of love.