An Analysis Of Those Winter Sundays By Robert Hayden

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Recommended: Comment on the theme of the poem and how the structure supports the poem those winter sundays by Robert Hayden

In Robert Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sundays”, he recalls what his father did on every winter Sunday and how he treated his father in the childhood. By using vivid images and selective words, Hayden describes how his father expressed love to him and his regretting to how he treated his father. The poem consists of three stanzas and is fourteen lines in free verse. Although the poem contains no end rhyme, it does have some melodic sounds. For instance, these words, “blueblack, cracked, ached, weekday, banked, thanked, wake, breaking” follow a K sound. They make the poem rhythmic and easy to read. Linking to those words chosen elaborately, the reader can easily feel the poet’s complex emotions. The first stanza of the poem is “Sundays too …show more content…

/ When the rooms were warm, he’d call, / and slowly I would rise and dress, / fearing the chronic angers of that house,” While the focus of the first stanza is on his dad, now the poet pays attention to himself. He could hear the cold “splintering, breaking.” It is a figurative. Of course the cold is not a material that can be broken. We can understand it as the wood breaking in the fireplace dispels the cold. The poet also lists a detail; he gets up slowly when the rooms were warm. It compares to his father wakes up at dawn every morning to support his family. The last sentence of stanza, “fearing the chronic angers of that house”, the poem shifts a bit. This poem is not a story of ungrateful family. It is more complicated than that; there is some anger in the air. We can understand it as the people living in this house being angry. The word, “chronic”, means the angers have been around a long time and would not disappear soon. The “chronic” usually is used to describe the sickness. But the poet uses it to describe the anger. So we know the emotion of the speaker for this anger is negative. He feels rotten. He is scared of it. Hayden does not explain what these angers are. But we can guess that perhaps his parents have an unhappy

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