Here’s a full analysis of the poem ‘Those Winter Sundays’ by Robert Hayden, tailored towards GCSE/IGCSE students but also suitable for those studying at a higher level.
Includes:
VOCABULARY
STORY / SUMMARY
SPEAKER / VOICE
LANGUAGE FEATURES
STRUCTURE / FORM
CONTEXT
THEMES
Those Winter Sundays
“Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold...”
Robert Hayden
(Full poem unable to be reproduced due to copyright)
VOCABULARY
Blueblack — a mixture of blue and black colours.
Austere — harsh, serious, strict, emotionally cold, no comfort or luxury.
Chronic — something that happens all the time, can relate to pain or suffering.
Indifferently — not caring or being emotional about something, neither good nor bad.
STORY / SUMMARY
Stanza 1: The persona’s father woke up early on cold Sunday mornings. The
father is a physical labourer as he works outside and has sore hands. The
persona remarks that nobody was grateful for his effort.
Stanza 2: The persona would hear his father wake up and as the father woke
up he would heat the house for the speaker and presumably the rest of
the family. The persona also feels the constant pain his father is in, and the
house seems to reflect this pain.
Stanza 3: The persona speaks unemotionally to the father, despite the fact
that the father put so much effort in to get the house warm and also polished
the boy’s shoes. He says he didn’t understand at the time that the father’s
behaviour was an act of love because he seemed cold and distant
, SPEAKER / VOICE
The speaker is a man reflecting on his past and his apathy toward his father
when the speaker was a child.
A reflective tone of voice, looking back, trying to make sense of all that was
going on, all that had happened. Over a period of time, probably years, the
speaker gains some perspective on the role of his father, but there are still
loose ends to tie up.
It’s clear that the speaker has matured a lot since his childhood, and he can
now recognize his father’s labor in and outside of the home as a form of love.
Our lack of knowledge of the speaker is part of what makes the poem speak
to so many people - we can all visualise ourselves in the speaker’s position,
as a child who doesn’t understand his/her parents. Many people respond to
this poem because they see themselves in it.
LANGUAGE FEATURES
• Hayden uses the term of address “father” instead of Papa, Daddy, or Dad, this term is more formal
also ties in with the idea of a selfless Christian father figure, a man who endures suffering for the
sake of others.
• Alliteration — ”weekday weather”- the image underscores the stability of a home and its capacity
to create a safe, warm environment for the father’s child and to put a roof over his head so that he is
protected from everyday hardships and difficulties.
• Plosive alliteration — The father creates “banked fires” and makes them “blaze” to create a
comfortable environment for his son. The repetition of the plosive ‘b’ sound emphasises the force
and power of the fires.
• Harsh consonant sounds / Dissonance — “cold,” “cracked,” and “ached” to evoke the harshness
of the speaker’s father’s life. The ‘k’ sound sticks in the throat, perhaps evoking hardship or the
speaker’s own difficult emotions as he looks back on his childhood and thinks about how ungrateful
he was for his father’s efforts.
• Metonymy — This is created in line 9 by using “the house” to represent the people in it. It is
personified as having ‘chronic angers’, which reflect the emotions of the individuals that live there -
the tension and difficulty they experience.
• Assonance — The repetition of vowel sounds in the same line, the sound of /o/ in “put his clothes
on in the blue black cold” - ‘clothes’ and ‘cold’ - create a connecting sound - this underscores the
harsh environment as we realise it is very unpleasant for the father to dress in those conditions.
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