Sunday

While “My Papa’s Waltz” and “Those Winter Sundays” differ in the attitudes and tones of their speakers, they are alike in the complex family relationships and themes of familial love, masculinity and sacrifice, and nostalgic youth that they communicate to the reader. A close-reading of the poems, with special attention paid to the speakers and the ideas they are trying to get across, can end up telling far more about Theodore Roethke and Robert Hayden than they may like. The speaker in “My…

“Those Winter Sundays” is technically a sonnet as it has 14 lines, however, it does not rhyme and is not in iambic pentameter. Nevertheless, sonnets are frequently identified as an expression of love and although “Those Winter Sundays” describes a love a father shows his children, it shares this commonality. In contrast, “We Real Cool” is broken in four stanzas, each containing a two line couplet. The rhyme is in the middle of the couplet not the end like many traditional poems giving readers…

The narrator in Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" displays a son's recollection of how his father conveyed love for him by way of his deeds. It is a poem about a father-son bond and all the different emotions that touch both of them: affection, approval, anxiety, fault and even animosity. The narrator recalls on Sunday mornings the father woke up at the crack of dawn to add fuel to the furnace fire. The son was never woken up until the house became warm enough to tolerate so he could get…

poem “Those Winter Sundays,” written by Robert Hayden and “Digging,” written by Seamus Heaney, both of them focus and prioritize the father role in their lives; however, it is the two speaker’s point of view, of what they were perceiving back then as a child is uncommon to each other. The speaker in the poem “Those Winter Sundays,”…

that may be unavoidable is regret. We certainly feel that if only we had known then what we know now, things may have turned out differently. Our world is altered through changes and experiences of maturity much like Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” It is a short poem about the rocky relationship between a father and son. The speaker is reflecting on his past and begins to understand the effort his father had given to show his compassion for him. Through misperception, the son was unable…

Compare and Contrast: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884) and The Blue Forest (1925) A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, painted by Georges Seurat in 1884, and The Blue Forest, created by Max Ernst in 1925, share resemblance as well as differences in both the formal elements and the context of art history in which they were created. La Grande Jatte depicts groups of people enjoying their leisure time on La Grande Jatte. Seurat was a Neo-Impressionist artist, who was fascinated with the scientific…

complementary colors next to each other intensifies them and that mixing complementary colors together muddies the color, he is known to have said that complementary colors “will either triumphantly sustain or utterly destroy each other.” Looking at A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, we can see evidence of these complementary color theories. The seated girl with the ponytail in the middle of the painting is wearing a dark blue coat. Upon closer examination, we can see that…

In the poem, “Those Winter Sundays”, Robert Hayden plays on various denotations of the word “office” to make clear that love often means taking on duties and responsibilities. The word appears in the last sentence of the poem and it’s ambiguous definition leaves the reader with room to interpret the word with various denotations: “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (13-14). This ambiguity therefore holds a great deal of influence over the reading of the…

The Sundays We Rarely Live Opening the doors to the smell of cocoa (gerund) that fills the air mixing with the cold air rushing in behind, shivers run up my back. Through the smell, I can hear laughter and chattering in the family room, quiet enough to hear the crackling of the fire that brings warmth to my bright red nose and ears. I then walk in to see my siblings and parents beam with joy as they see me approach. While I bask in their love, I know that some walk into their home and don't feel…

word used to speak of the performance of obligations to others in some type of fashion. In Robert Hayden’s, “Those Winter Sundays”, it explains a son’s regret over his inability to honor and truly appreciate his very own father during his upbringing. Throughout the poem, Hayden uses one event to describe the relationship of a father and a son. Within the poem “Those Winter Sundays”, Hayden uses many different emotions such as unconditional love, fear, ungratefulness, hate, and…