Those Winter Sundays By Robert Hayden

Are Sunday’s in the winter special to you? Well, in the poem “Those Winter Sundays”, written by Robert Hayden, he writes about a special memory he has of his father when he was a kid on a wintery Sunday. The memory starts out regarding how his father would wake up early on winter mornings, on all days of the week. His father would get the house ready for the day before everyone else woke up. Years later when Robert is all grown up, he feels guilty for never thanking his father for all that he did for him and his family. This poem, possibly took place somewhere during the 1940’s-60. The mornings were described as “blueblack cold” (Robert 2) to convey that the mornings were so cold you could get frostbite. Then concernment is shown towards his father’s hands that were cracked from the hard work he had to perform in the dry, iciness of the winter. Owing to the fact that Hayden had been just a child when this memory occurred, he described the house to be angry whenever the wood was “splintering, breaking” (Robert 6). The cause for the wood to be splintering and breaking is because the heat coming from the fire caused heat expansion to occur in the wood of …show more content…
The reason why such a big deal is made of the fact that he wakes early on Sunday mornings is because Sundays are considered to be the day when God rested from creating the Earth. Meaning that on Sundays, Christians take a break and do little to no work. The story’s emphasis on Sundays mean that his father was expected to sleep in and relax, but instead he woke up early, started a fire, and polished his son’s shoes; the exact opposite of what’s expected on a Sunday. The first line of the paragraph reads “Sundays too my father got up early” (Robert 1). The supposed addition of the word too, shows that on other days, possibly the entire week, Hayden’s father would wake up early; not constricting to just waking up early on