A Close Reading of Hayden's Poem

A Close Reading of “Those Winter Sundays” Mike Landroche

1. Does the piece have a title? What does the title suggest about the language?

The title “Those Winter Sundays” suggests the poem is about a particular day of the week, Sunday, a day of rest, spiritual renewing for some. The poem also anticipates a time of year, winter, cold and snowy. The first word of the title suggests the poem’s pointing to a particular type of past experience.

2. Who is the speaker of the piece? What do we know about him or her? Does the speaker reflect on the experience with a particular attitude (tone)? Is there an identified auditor, the “you” in the poem to whom the language is being directed?

The adult speaker reflects on his childhood home, a cold physical and emotional space. He is especially reflecting on his father’s conducting of “love’s lonely and austere offices.” While the speaker regrets his role in the house with “No one ever thanked him,” he attempts to give himself a break with “what did I know?” He was just a child.

3. What is the occasion which leads to the uttering of the language?

I imagine the speaker, a father now himself, has discovered that he too undertakes “love’s lonely and austere offices.” Perhaps he has woken early to raise his daughter or son for a 5:00 a.m. hockey practice. Perhaps he is shoveling the walkway or driveway so that his family can leave for school or work or a play day in the snow. Some activity, unrecognized and un-appreciated by rest of his family, pushes his thoughts to his own father, and he remembers those winter Sundays when his own, unappreciated father warmed the house before anyone else got up.

4. Does the language relate a sequence of events (narrative)? Is the narrative central to the meaning of the language or to the experience being shared?

The first stanza establishes the reminiscence and half the poem’s idea, but it begins a description of a process of the father’s waking and making “banked fires blaze.” The second stanza continues with the speaker’s waking “when the rooms were warm,” but the stanza introduces the chronic angers of the house, angers that produce, in the third stanza, the speaker’s addressing his father indifferently. The poem ends with the adult speaker excusing his reaction to his father as arising out of ignorance.

5. Does the language play with sound in any way? Does this sound-play point your attention to specific words or phrases central to the meaning?

The consonant hard “k” sounds, beginning with “blueblack cold,” hacks, like someone with a winter cold, loudly through the first stanza – “cracked hands that ached,” weekday weather,” banked fires” and “thanked.” The “k sound” is the cold in the poem, and as the house warms up, we hear the sound only at the beginning of the next two stanza -- “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.” and “Speaking indifferently to him,/ who had driven out the cold.” These harsh sounds, suggestive of the chronic angers that linger in a warm house, contrasts with the softer “w” repeated in “weekday weather,” and echoing back later in the poem with “wake,” “when,” “house,” “who” and “what.” These two sound, one formed in the back of the mouth and the other at the lips mirror with sound the harshness and warmth of the house.

6. How does the language invoke the imagination? Is the image central to the reader’s experience of the poem? Be specific.

Image is central to this poem and its meaning. The reader feels the “blueblack cold” and feels the warmth of blazing banked fires. We see the father’s cracked hands and the shoes those hands shined sitting next to the kitchen stove. We feel the thawing of the house and the sounds it makes as it thaws – splintering, breaking. Cold in this poem is symbolic, so it is made all the more powerful when we feel the colds.

7. Does the language suggest an idea? Is the idea central to the reader’s experience of the poem? Be specific.

The language suggest an idea about parents and children: As children we sometimes experience as “chronic angers of that house,” our parents’ doing the best they can to get by. Only later in life, and often in guilt, can we reinterpret our parents’ attention to their “austere and lonely offices” as expressions of love.

8. Does the language inspire any emotional response? Is the emotion central? Specifically, what words or phrases in language evoke these feelings?

I see my father’s hands, “cracked hands that ached/from labor in the weekday weather.” I hear my father call me before I want to get out of bed. I regret my indifference, my own “cold,” and remember now my father warmly.

9. Does the language play with words by “twisting” meaning? What is the effect of these twists, tropes or figures?

The poem wants us to read “weekday weather” as metonymic, standing in for the father’s job as some kind of manual laborer – suggesting he works hard during the week, but on Sundays too he worked. Perhaps “cracked hands” is an example of synecdoche, where the hands are standing in for the entire body. Since cold cannot splinter and break, there is a “twisting” of meaning hear as well. The line is both onomatopoeiatic and metaphorical. “Splintering” and “breaking” sound like the creaking of a house warming up on a cold winter morning, but the line also gives agency to the cold, thus it is an example of personification. The poem also endows the cold that remains, but giving the house the capacity to feel “chronic angers.” The poem suggest that even as the physical cold gives way to warmth, a cold remains, a cold his father had “driven out,” the final overt metaphor, as if cold is an unwanted guest, a deadbeat tenant or a community pariah. Love, too, is personified as having offices (duties) lonely and austere.

10. Does the language use representation? Are these symbols central to the idea of the poem?

A few symbols populate the poem, mostly symbols representing the father’s “austere’s and lonely offices:” He would make “banked fires blaze,” polish the speakers “good shoes.” The father’s” cracked hands that ached” are symbolic of his hard weekday labor. The speaker’s indifference to his father “who had driven out the cold” is ultimately symbolic of the child’s ignorance of his father’s plight. The most obvious symbol comes in the line “and polished my good shoes as well.”

11. Does the language play with the reader’s expectations and sense of reality? Are these points of irony and paradox central to the idea of the poem?

Irony and paradox brackets the poem’s central image of cold. Paradoxically, the fire drives out the cold, but a chill remains. Ironically, the speaker remembers regretfully his own chilly “indifference,” but as an adult, he remembers his father with warmth.

12. Does the language have an overall pattern? What key words or phrases echo in the language? Is the language structured into parts (stanzas)? Is complexity of the experience made less complex by any structural devices?

The poem structures the reader’s experience in three stanzas. See response to #4. The first stanza contains two sentences, the second beginning and ending in the fifth line. Its separateness from the rest of the stanza is Heminway-esque. The lines abruptness emphasizes its theme. The second sentence of the middle stanza, mirrors its meaning as well. A dependent clause begins the sentence, followed by the two independent clauses, the final one elongated even more by a participle phrase – together imitating the way the speaker would rise from his bed. The final stanza begins with a sentence fragment, as if it is an afterthought, a tacked on participle phrase to be added to the one before it. The poem ends with a question, but the speaker already knows the answer. The rhetorical nature of the final two lines prompts the adult reader to ask, “What, really, did I know of my parents’ love, life and work?”

13. Overall, what is artful about the language? In what imaginative, intellectual, sensual or emotional way(s) does the language represent the complexity of human experience?

The art here builds from the image. I see the kitchen of house. I feel it warming. I’m wary of the cold that remains. So the image gives way to feeling. What we adults remember and give voice to from our childhoods often gives us insight into our contemporary selves.

14. Finally, is the language valuable? Is it worth reading? Remember: New Criticism is essentially a theory of linguistic value! A work is valuable only if it expresses coherently the complexity of the human experience.

The poem is valuable because it compresses experience, with images of human toil and human anger, of physical and emotional cold and warmth. Metaphor and symbol artfully place the reader in the same position of the speaker, an adult thinking back on his childhood and understanding and ruing the times his own indifference chilled his relationships with his father. It is valuable because it shines a soft light on one element of the human experience.

15. What-How Thesis for Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”

Imagery invites us into the speaker’s home, while metaphor and symbol emphasize “cold warmth” of the speaker’s reminiscence of his father.