Symbolism In Those Winter Sundays By Robert Hayden

Like paint to a canvas and sounds to music, words constructed in order create a beautiful piece of art called poetry that attempts to instill a piece of life in the reader using the word choices and order. In Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden the entire poem seems to be discussing a father who gets up early in the morning to start a fire. The first stanza discusses the specifics of the father’s labor. The second and third stanza, however, discuss the son’s reaction and relationship to the father’s work. While this poem does discuss the relationship between the son and his father, hidden within the poem are elements of darkness intertwined with the father’s love. Those Winter Sundays first begins with the child saying, “Sundays too my father …show more content…
His environment is described as “blueblack cold” when he tries to prepare for work (line 2). The conditions of cold that he prepares for and enacts his work in are harsh, and the colors of black and blue add to the imagery of a bruise, symbolizing the environment as harsh enough to make a lasting impression and impact. However, the cold could also symbolize the basic environment that the house starts in. The dad is the only one awake presently in the house, and therefore could mean the dad is cold and is surrounded by emotional coldness. The impact of the work is shown in “cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze” (lines 3-5). The labor the father is involved with and environment he worked in, cracked his hands and caused them to ache adding to his hard work, but the work he was doing created blazing fires that used to be banked. The fire however, alludes to what his work was creating in the home and the fires being previously banked symbolizes that the fires that have raged with heat have been in coldness for some time, agreeing …show more content…
The father gets up early in the morning to create a fire that not only provides physical heat, but spiritual warmth for the home, while stirring up anger and fighting off the coldness present in the house. This anger is a result of the son’s indifference to the father going out of his way to express his love for his son, by even polishing the son’s good shoes. The son only expresses he doesn’t understand how love creates this anger in the father and does not realize he is the cause of the father’s anger. The whole poem surrounds a father’s love for his son that creates darkness because the son is indifferent of the father’s actions of