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.

The same principle of the unconditional and giving love of a parent is at work in my poem. I began somewhat differently...

In fact, it is a complete inversion, whereby I gave most agency to the mother character at the end of the poem and spent the first two four stanzas focusing on the more selfish voice of the child narrator. In my poem, the narrator is weighed down by his own "austere and lonely" circumstances, that of a childhood of relative poverty and a broken family. Yet the child narrator fails to see what the adult can: That what he lacks in possessions, he has in the selfless love of his mother.
Both the Hayden work and my own poem create a world from the memory of an adult, but with the perspective of childhood in mind. Both also use color (Hayden's cold is "blueblack," my ideal autumns are "vermilion"). But the most crucial commonality is the way in which the adult narrator expresses grief at the loss of the childhood moment whereby he could have given his parent credit or love in return. Hayden's poem ends with that tortured question, whose phrase "what did I know" is repeated to indicate a depth of suffering (Hayden). My poem ends with the imagined whispers of the mother, predicting that the child will understand her sacrifice someday.

Works Cited

Hayden, Robert. "Those Winter Sundays." Collected Poems of Robert Hayden. Liveright,

1985.Poetry Foundation. 2011. Web. 01 May 2011.

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