Those Winter Sundays (Style)

Style

Robert Hayden had great understanding and skill when it came to writing in traditional forms and meter. Most often though he straddled the line of these forms and free-verse. “Those Winter Sundays” is an excellent example of how he would do this as it contains certain elements of a traditional sonnet. It is fourteen lines long, though these are broken up into three stanzas of five, four, and five lines respectively. Many of the lines are also written with exactly ten syllables, and while they are not in iambic pentameter, they are of the same length as the lines of traditional sonnets. Hayden would often use these loose interpretations of forms in his poetry.

Sometimes he would just use a certain number of stanzas, possibly composed of the same number of lines. Regardless of what form he used, Hayden’s poems always display meticulous consideration and control of the language and appear very strong or solid on the page.

Throughout the poem Hayden uses several poetic techniques that help hold the poem together and increase the power of the language. The first of these is consonance, which is the repetition of certain consonant sounds. The first stanza of the poem establishes a hard “c” sound, as in “cracked,” that is found often in the poem. There is also some use of alliteration. This is the close proximity of words beginning with the same consonant sound. An example from the first stanza is “weekday weather.” Finally, Hayden establishes very subtly a metaphor, or a figure of speech that allows one object to be representative of another. In this case it is the fire the father builds, that resembles the speaker’s discovery of his father’s love where he previously thought none existed.