The Poet Robert Hayden wrote the poem “Those Winter Sundays” depicting a Person remembering the love of his father that he failed to understand when he was young and returned with cold indifference. The protagonist is shown to be lamenting his past relationship with his father.
The claim that the poet makes in this poem is that parental love need not be shown in obvious ways. It can be projected with a subtlety that is hard to detect but is always there. The poem relates to the love of a father for his family. The evidence that supports this claim is scattered throughout the poem. Firstly, in the first stanza, the poet depicts the father waking up before daybreak to brave the frigid cold of the morning to go out and chop wood in order to light a fire in his house. It is shown that he does this even though his hands are sore and aching from a week’s worth of hard labor and maybe even from age. In the second stanza, it is shown that he only wakes up the rest of the family once the firewood is set and lit inside the house, and the house is warm. Finally, the poet gives a very obvious token of the father’s love by telling us that he even polished the son’s shoes before waking him up. It is depicted that all of this is done by the father without asking for help from anyone and that the child is unaware of the intensity of emotions that drive the father to sacrifice his own comfort, and sees that his actions are only a necessary duty. This claim differs from the personalities of different fathers but can be considered a universal claim. This is because fathers, being men and traditionally the ones who hold the responsibilities of safety and provision for the family, tend not to be open about their feelings for others, and usually express themselves in indirect, less vocal ways. My own father works day and C. He shows his love for me by being very lenient with the decisions he makes that concern me. Often I realize how alike my father and I are in nature and it was his love that made me so.
Works Cited
Hayden Robert, “Those Winter Sundays”, The Wondering Minstrels page, Rice computer science university official website, 2008. Web.