Those Winter Sundays (Themes)

Themes

Memory

It is evident that the speaker of this poem is telling his story from a distance in time. In trying to describe what it was like at his house on those mornings, he comes up with details that do not necessarily give the reader a vivid picture of the way things were. The details we are given are more impressionistic, giving us a sense of the young observer through the impressions he received. From the details here we can tell that the father worked hard as a laborer, outdoors in the cold; that the house was heated by a furnace that would burn out overnight; that the house was filled with unspecified “chronic angers”; and that the son owned more than one pair of shoes and he wore the good pair on Sunday. From these few facts, the reader has to fill in the life that has either slipped from the speaker’s mind, been suppressed, or has purposely been left incomplete to make the reader think.

Despite the good shoes, this is obviously a poor family: the father works six days a week (indicated by “Sundays too”), and the temperature in the house was allowed to drop so low in the night that reheating it made the woodwork splinter and break. For such a poor household to have special shoes for Sunday implies deep religious conviction, and yet there are those chronic angers. Who else lived there? Does “No one ever thanked him” refer to the child’s mother, siblings or extended family? These details are left out of this memory.

“What did I know,” the speaker repeats in the thirteenth line. Now an intellectual, he uses the words “austere” and “offices” when simpler, more direct words would be sufficient. From this perspective, only the harshest details surface to memory. The speaker of the poem tells us about love, but there is no mention of that love in the details that he remembers, precisely because the slim clues of his father’s love are shadows among things he remembers. The poem tells us that we tend to remember the bad things in life so clearly that it gives a distorted impression, but that we can find love when we examine our strongest memories.

Anger

The house in this poem is described as suffering “chronic angers,” meaning, first, that there is more than one type of anger there, and second that they are not brief flare-ups but are constant, and will keep repeating until they are cured. The reader is not given the source or sources of these angers. The reader does not even know to whom they belong. The poem’s speaker is afraid of this anger, so he is not the root of it, although he does contribute to the atmosphere by speaking indifferently. The father could be responsible for several layers of anger himself: a man working hard to raise a son alone could blame society for the bills he has to pay, or he could be angry at the boy’s mother, whether she has left him or even if she is dead. Anger is irrational. The reference to “no one” in line 5 implies, though, that several people live in the house and benefit from the stoked furnace. Whatever the relationship between the author and the events of the poem, it would be unfair of him to write a poem about anger without indicating the anger’s cause. Therefore, we can assume at least part of Hayden’s message to be that hard work causes anger; the ironic twist here is that the hard work is itself caused by love.

Love

The household described here is ruled more by anger than by love, but at the end of the poem the speaker points out the love that he can see only now. Clearly, he was aware of his father’s actions as a child — he knew that his father woke up on Sundays to light the furnace in the cold, and that he polished the child’s shoes. If these gestures are only recognized by the son later in life, then their significance to him must have grown in his mind. It is a bleak childhood presented to the reader. There is something ominous about the improvised compound word “blueblack,” the description of the father’s cracked and aching hands, and the splintering, breaking sounds of the house warming. It is not until late in the second stanza that any emotions are revealed. At first the boy’s reluctance is shown with his rising “slowly,” but that can be explained away any number of ways until the very next line reveals what the tone of the poem has hinted at all along: fear. The poem first makes us feel, and then it describes, a hostile atmosphere that the speaker grew up in, so frightening that it made him stifle his words, “speaking indifferently,” even though he was to grow up to speak the flowing diction of the poem’s last line. This is the classic pattern of an oppressive, overbearing parent and a child who is rueful but obedient. The eternal question for psychologists and poets is whether such a relationship represents actual love, or if the child’s obedience is based only on intimidation. Hayden tries to show that love was hidden within anger, and he proves it by showing the father in a positive light, first physically (with descriptions) and then with the final line’s justification. The adult speaker of this poem could blame the father for being a bully and passing his pain along, but he does not. In the end, he says that he understands his father’s actions to signify love.