Analysis of Those Winter Sundays
Let’s meet our speaker and his old man. His dad gets up early in the morning every single day even on Sundays. The father gets up and lights the fire place and warms the house. Not only, does he work seven days a week, the speaker evens states that he gets no recognition for his work. The boy was afraid of his father and his own house. He refers to his house filled with “chronic angers”(“Winter”,9), rather than happiness or peace. Then, once the speaker jumped off his bed, he’d run towards his dad but not with any kind of excitement or affections. He did this even though; the father lit all the fire in the house and even polished his son’s shoes. The speaker then ends with a present self-explaining that he didn’t understand why his father lit the fireplace in the house or shined his shoes. He states that it was his father’s way of showing his affection.
The poem primary revolves around the love of a father to his family or son. Everything from the setting to the wordplay initial suggested that, this would be a poem about surviving a harsh winter. The poem is very concerned with the concept of temperature. It starts off cold, then warms up and then abrupt in flames to only be lit out by water. The weather outside and inside the house reflects the relationship with his father. In other words, the weather is a symbol or representation of the speaker’s inner feelings and relationship with his father.
We can take a look at the title, “Those Winter Sundays” referring to obvious the winter, meaning cold and Sundays which are usually family days also referring to as cold. This symbolism is presented all along the poem to give it a dark mood. “Sundays too my father got up early/ and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold”(1-2), here the speaker is giving a correlation between the Sundays (and his father) to being blueblack cold. Hayden captures this early morning winter feeling perfectly with the term “blueblack”(2) that pops...