Pastiche and defense in Robert Hayden's Those Winter Sundays

Pastiche & Defense on "Those Winter Sundays" by Robet Hayden

Cataloging

Back then, life was thick with all the things I didn't have:

Vermilion autumns along black streets, toys that buzzed and beeped and gave the illusion of flight, grown-ups whose voices laugh-sang when recalling a clever quip I'd made, house that wrapped around me like the dense blue of the horizon.

The things I had:

I don't know.

Apartment I never knew.

Father I knew when he knew me.

A mother, back sore from earning hours, draped over this glued chair, this sauced face, this steamy stovetop.

Hands like divers, plowing without fear or hesitation into a dark lagoon.

Then, that rush to keep up,

To stay in a decent school,

To feed ourselves first and Worry about luxury later,

Seemed like a cruel joke.

I was as good as those boys with the Pressed linen and mocking smiles.

For now, the wirework of memory is spun, twisted, and soldered.

Can't return to those nights, alone in a shared bed, wondering when one job became two, when two would become something better.

And she would tromp in,

Golden hair falling out of its careful knot.

She would make room between my brother and me, her work-warm bones settling.

Sometimes she would whisper, but I could never hear it.

Maybe something like "tomorrow" or "One day, you'll do the same."

Defense

The poem "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden is an exploration of the childhood lack of recognition for parental sacrifice. It is told from the point-of-view of an adult narrator recalling his father's willingness to rise early on winter mornings to heat the house for the rest of the family. It offers perspective into both relatable themes of youthful apathy and grown-up regret, with regard to how we treat those who love and care for us most. My poem, "Cataloging," attempts to accomplish the same goal of providing reflective narration which illuminates what has been learned from what was overlooked in childhood and a newfound appreciation for effort that was once taken for granted. I drew parallels to Hayden's work by creating images which hinted at family struggle, but also gave evidence to the selfless warmth that parental love provides.

Hayden beings his poem with the character of the father and his central action: creating a fire to warm the family home. Through heavy personification, the narrator gives the impression that the father was fighting battles against two enemies: the house and the cold. The cold is "splintering, breaking" and the house possesses "chronic angers" (Hayden). Evident are the battle scars of this father, himself a symbol of masculine capability. He possesses "cracked hands that ached / from labor" (Hayden). By contrast, the narrator fears the angers of the house, sleeps while his father is fighting the cold.

In the last stanza, there is further evidence of the dynamic between father and son, given that he commences "speaking indifferently to him, / who had driven out the cold / and polished my good shoes as well" (Hayden). The father has provided two services to keep the child both alive (through the fire) and well-outfitted. But the son is indifferent. It shows a callousness that is hard to forgive, given that from the outset of the poem the reader is told that the father provides these services "Sundays too" (Hayden). Thus while the father is meant to be resting from a difficult work week, he is instead caring for his family.

It is important to note the two places in the poem where the reader can see that the narrator has the benefit of hindsight in evaluating his father's good deeds. The first is at the end of the first stanza, where the narrator states "No one ever thanked him" (Hayden). The narrator now recognizes the flaws in his own actions. Yet it is not simply "I never thanked him," but "No one." The narrator recognizes that there was not only a flaw in their relationship, but in the way his father was treated by his family as a whole, and perhaps the world. The poem as a whole sets a tone of lower- or working-class people (the reference to hands weary from labor provides the best clue) who struggle, often in silence, to stay afloat.

The poem functions, in an indirect way, as the thank you that the narrator never provided his father. This is best evidenced in the last two lines, where the narrator realizes the error of his ways and wonders if he understood the mechanisms of love as a child. Love is a place, more precisely a place with "offices," which are "austere and lonely" (Hayden). Therefore, just as the child does not understand the work life of his parents, he also can not appreciate the emotional place that a parent must go to sacrifice his or her own comfort and rest to provide for his or her children.