Those Winter Sundays Analysis

In the poem “Those Winter Sundays” poet Robert Hayden expresses the theme of realization and love through a descriptive poem about the actions of his father, and the effect of the speaker then and now. Hayden begins the poem with the line “Sundays too my father got up early”, which shows that every morning his father would get up early. This line helps to strengthen the theme of fatherly love because Sunday is usually a day of rest, most businesses are closed on Sunday due to this common principle. However, the speaker’s father would still wake up early even though his body (“…with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather…) had shown signs of his tiredness. Usually people listen to their body for they listen to their minds;

Surprisingly enough the father seems to make this a part of his daily routine, which is remarkable and is truly an indicator that the father shows love for his family even if he is not appreciated. As the poem progresses the speaker shows that his home experience was not one of purely love itself. The speaker states “fearing the chronic angers of that hoes”, which from that it can be inferred that tension and anger had been an ongoing feeling in the speaker’s household. As the poem concludes we see that the speaker reflects back on not so much as his father’s actions, but his reaction. It can be concluded that with the “chronic anger” in his household, that he did not know what love was or how love can be characterized. The author then realizes that his father truly loved him, and he had been blind to that because that was not what love looked in the eyes of the speaker at a young age. This is where the theme of realization is expressed, because the author has reflected and has reached a realization that his father was not obligated to do these