Robert Hayden\'s Poem Those Winter

¶ … Robert Hayden's poem "Those Winter Days"

Is the poem lyric, narrative, or dramatic? How do you know?

One of the most intensely personal subjects for any human being, whether the person is a poet or a non-poet, is his or her relationship with their parents. The poem "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden is a quiet yet forceful lyric poem that depicts the poetic speaker's father during the father's characteristic Sunday winter routine in the morning. Unlike a narrative poem, this poem is not the story of specific day that was an unusual deviation from this weekly winter morning schedule. In weaving the poem's fabric, the speaker is not consciously taking on an alternative persona from the poet, as in a dramatic monologue, in which the poet explicitly creates distance between him or herself and the speaker character assumed in the poem. Instead, the narrator of the poem reflects upon the life of his father in classical lyric form, a lyric that is a personal meditation upon a particular, personal subject.

Denotations and connotations

Denotations of unfamiliar words: (literal meanings)

Splintering: n.

A sharp, slender piece, as of wood, bone, glass, or metal, split or broken off from a main body.

A splinter group.

v. splin tered, splin ter ing, splin ters v. intr.

To split or break into sharp, slender pieces; form splinters.

Austere:

Severe or stern in disposition or appearance; somber and grave: the austere figure of a Puritan minister.

Strict or severe in discipline; ascetic: a desert nomad's austere life.

Having no adornment or ornamentation; bare: an austere style

Connotations of familiar and unfamiliar significant words in the poem

Blueblack: black and blue like a bruise

Chronic: an ailment that never really goes away, like arthritis

Splintering: painful, like a splinter caught in one's finger

Austere: Very removed, haughty

Offices: religious rituals, like the offices of a mass or working in an office

What is the tone of the poem? Irony?

The overall tone of the poem is mournful, almost like a eulogy, which suggests that the poet's father is dead, although this is not stated in the poem. The poem seems to mourn the relationship that the speaker had -- and never had -- with his father. The lines such as: "No one ever thanked him [the poet's father]," for putting on the fire early Sunday mornings, even though the father did not have to wake up for the "weekday" work that "cracked" his hands" suggests that the speaker wishes he could go back and thank his father for the father's kind and silent gestures. The last line is almost a cry: "What did I know, what did I know/of love's austere and lonely offices?"

The son seems to suggest that now he is mature enough to appreciate that even though people like the poet's father cannot always speak about how much they love someone, such outwardly cold people often show this love in other ways, like making a fire and polishing the young poet's shoes. But the "chronic angers of that house" suggest that there is another side to the father's character that prevented the speaker and his father from becoming close. Ironically, although the fire had physically "driven out the cold," of the house, the emotional relationship of the young speaker and his father remains cold in the poem.

Who is speaking in this poem?

The narrator of the poem is speaking about his perceptions as an adult of his father's labor. He looks back upon himself as a child, remembering how he felt as a child, moving slowly and fearfully in his own home, apparently wishing his father were different than the cold and angry man his father seemed. The narrator wishes that his childhood self was more accepting of his father's love -- but also wishes that his father was easier to love, so that their relationship could have been closer.

Sense experience

The poem relies upon sensory images that mainly pertain to touch and sight, which intensifies the contrast between the cold outdoors, the warm fire the father has made within the home, and the exterior coldness of the man and his warm actions. The "blueblack cold" of a winter morning suggests the touch of cold and the sight of blue frost in the darkness. The "cracked hands" of the father who labors for his living appeals to a sense of cold, harsh touch. The son can "hear the cold splintering" and feel the "banked fires blaze," a contrast of the cold sound of ice and the warm crackling fire, and the contrasting sensations of cold and warmth.

The contrast between the physical, particularly the tactile sense of warm and cold, intensifies the sense of thwarted love the father feels for the boy, but cannot really show, except in rising early to make a fire and polish the boy's good shoes.

Figures of speech

Synecdoche: (a single thing that stands for larger meaning) Lighting a fire becomes a synecdoche or stand-in for the man's entire relationship with his son.

Hyperbole: The suggestion "No one ever thanked him" causes the reader to wonder -- Never? Not even the boy's mother? The narrator probably means he cannot ever remember regularly thanking his father, and thus feels guilty. The "cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather," is also hyperbolic as the man's hands are unlikely to still be aching from regular works, although this shows that he works for a living at manual labor.

Metaphor: the metaphor of the cold winter house lit by a warm fire is a metaphor for the coldness of the son and the father's relationship, only briefly warmed by the fire.

Sound

Alliteration: "blueblack," "weekday weather," "banked fires blaze"

Assonance: "cracked hands," "warm, he'd call," "weekday...banked...thanked"

Consonance: "cold," "chronic" "cracked" "ached" (c-sounds)

Rhyme Scheme: The poem is unrhymed, and does not have a consistent syllable count for every line like a sonnet, although it is fourteen lines and has a kind of sonnet-like resolution at the end of the poem. The poem begins with an image in the first stanza, makes that image more complex in the following stanzas, and then resolves the problem, stating the speaker's more mature view of his father, without fully resolving the relationship.