Poetry Response 5: "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden

The narrator's father never rests because the poem starts out by saying that "Sundays too my father got up early."  So even on Sundays, a day of rest,  the narrator's father still continues to wake up early.   Also from the title it is revealed that it is winter which must mean that the early mornings are still very dark.  In the next line of the poem it proves that the winter mornings are dark, "blueblack cold," and very cold.  So it must be hard to get out of bed, but the narrator's father still gets up despite the cold weather and dark weather.  His father is a hardworking man because his hands are cracked and aching from the labor of the week.  He wakes up every morning to start a warm fire but the narrator notices that no one ever thanked him for doing so.

In the next stanza, the narrator recalls how his father would call for him to wake up after the rooms warmed up and he would get up slowly afraid of the cold still lurking in the house.  Then he would speak to his father, who had gotten up early to make sure the house was warm before he got up, without any feelings or gratitude.  His father did so much for him; besides preparing the fire, he shined his shoes.  But the narrator was ignorant to everything that his father had done for him which is why he says, "What did I know."  The narrator claims that he had no idea of the love that his father bestowed upon him, the love that was unnoticeable to him.  Making his father's love lonely by not seeing it in the things that he had done for him, "love's austere and lonely offices."

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?