Figurative Language In Those Winter Sundays

Mitch Albom, American author, once said, “I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn't.” (Good Reads). Albom, like many matured children, only realized the sacrifices and reasoning for some of his parent’s actions only after he had grown up. Relationships between family members are a constant shifting matter. Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” is a powerful poem about a father-child relationship and all the feelings that come with it: love, admiration, anger, misunderstanding, even hate. “Those Winter Sundays” incorporates many aspects of temperature in order to portray the …show more content…
In line 5, Hayden writes, “banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.” And again in line 6, “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.” The poem lacks in end rhyme, but like the father’s sacrifices, the internal rhyme goes seemingly unnoticed. Internal rhyme can be found in almost every line, similarly to the constant sacrifices the father is making. Another technique Hayden utilizes is the use of short words containing hard consonants. This can be found in words such as “blueblack, cold, cracked, banked, chronic, breaking, speaking”. The harsh sounding words are implemented to emphasize the hardness and struggles in life for the speaker’s father. In line 6, “splintering” and “breaking” suggest the hot summer days that cause wooden floors to crack. Hayden also uses alliteration throughout the poem. In instances like line 2, “put his clothes on in the blueblack cold”, the alliteration is used in combination with synesthesia to fully describes the coldness. Again in line 14, Hayden compares love and loneliness through the use of alliteration: “love’s austere and lonely