Those Winter Sundays Literary Devices

As children, we all view our relationship with our parents as something sacred. If suddenly that relationship began to fade little by little one would feel a great amount of sorrow. Poet, Robert Hayden, captured this complicated child and parent relationship in his free verse poem, “Those Winter Sundays.” In “Those Winter Sundays”, Hayden uses multiple literary devices and rhetorical methods to illustrate his feelings towards a tricky father and child relationship. Written in a simple iambic pattern and constructed into three stanzas, “Those Winter Sundays” displays no exact rhyme scheme. With this information, the reader understands that Hayden’s poem takes on a free verse structure. With the poem being free verse, the poet can express his feelings without limitations of strict structure. With that being said, “Those Winter Sundays” contains a variety of lines in each stanza. Throughout the poem the speaker is comparing his observations of his father from then to now. Throughout the first stanza of “Those Winter Sundays” Hayden uses synesthesia and alliterations to hint towards the overall theme of the free verse poem. The first lines of the opening stanza begin by using synesthesia to express a color as it reads, “Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold” (Hayden 1-2). The words “blueblack” and

The lines that refer to the regret read, “What did I know, what did know,” (Hayden 13). Hayden then concludes the whole poem in line fourteen by using the the repetition and very serious words to express the speaker’s final feelings. By using the words “love’s austere” and “lonely” Hayden gets across that the speaker was not able handle the responsibility of love and caused his father to feel lonely because he never thanked him for the Sunday morning fire when he should