Those Winter Sundays

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

This poem has a very depressing and regretful mood dispersed throughout its lines. It is from the narrators hindsight of a childhood memory that the poem is told. Its main focus is the thankless role the father most always plays in the family. He speaks about how his father would dutifully wake up first to lead the family into the day and dispel the cold from the waking house. His father was a laboring man, tough and simple in nature. The narrator speaks of this, "then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze" (Hayden 781). His father endured through much laboring and pain for his family, however, the narrator speaks that as a naive child, "No one ever thanked him." This whole poem mainly seems to be an ode to the grown up little boys father. As a child, his firm father may have seemed less of a comforting presence than his possibly caring mother, however the love his father had for his family and the amount of care still equaled that of hers. That is what is meant when he speaks of the austere offices. Although his very private and course father did not always directly show love, he still lived to his duties out of love for his family.