Diction In Those Winter Sundays

Diction in a poem is the way the author chooses and uses specific words to bring meaning to their poems. Typically words can often had many different words, resulting in the poem being able to be read in different point of views. Depending on the context and meaning of the poem, the author may use formal, middle, or informal diction. Diction needs to be analyzed by the selection of vocabulary but the author and how they use it to bring their poem together. The poems “Sailing to Byzantium,” “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” and “On Turning Ten” all have different types of diction that are specific to the poem itself, yet different to one another. Using diction, all three authors bring a different feel and meaning to each poem.
In “Sailing to Byzantium” …show more content…
The diction in the poem helps show the speaker’s emotion and regrets toward his father when he was young and as an adult. Hayden uses diction to keep the poem short, however still have a deep meaning. The first line of the poem, “Sundays too my rather got up early,” shows the father’s hard-working persona. However, the formal title of “father” rather than dad or pop shows the distance of the relationship between the two characters. In the first stanza, “harsh,” “pain,” and “cold are used to depict the type of job the father did. “Put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,” the word “blueblack” could mean a bruise, something that is associated with pain. In the last lines of stanza two, “chronic anger” is states, expressing the father’s demeanor toward the family. A big piece of diction is used when the speaker makes a shift of tone in the last stanza. In the first eleven lines, the speaker centered around words with the “k” sound such as, “clothes...cold…cracked…chronic.” However, in the last stanza in the last three lines, the “k” sound gets replaced with “o” sounds such as, “good…know…love…lonely.” This diction shows how when the speaker was young, he did not sympathize and understand how much the father sacrificed and provided for the family, until he became an adult. In the last stanza the speaker now realizes as an adult and regrets that he never helped or thanked his father for how much he did for the family. “What did I know of love’s austere,” the use of “love” to describe the father’s actions implies that the speaker’s feelings and respect for his father have changed. The diction fits with the theme unnoticed love because the speaker was never aware that what his father did was love until he grew