Those Winter Sundays (1962). Detailed description

“Those Winter Sundays” is an often-anthologized Hayden poem. It offers a portrait of a boy’s perception of his father, which seems to be based on Hayden’s own boyhood. He captures both the attitude of the boy and the adult looking back at his behavior.

The first verse sets the Sunday morning scene, brittle with cold, as the father rises to warm the house for his family. The details are significant—the cold is “blueblack,” the father’s hands cracked and aching. But he is silent—no complaint, no comment. Yet, “No one ever thanked him.”

In the second verse Hayden develops the scene with more sensory impressions. This time, the speaker can “hear the cold splintering, breaking.” He points out that his father called for everyone to get up only after “the rooms were warm.” But he explains his own slow response, “fearing the chronic angers of that house.” The speaker here struggles to sort out his feelings as he remembers those days. His father was apparently a good man, responsible and willing to work hard, with cracked and aching hands to provide a physically warm place for his family. But what about these “chronic angers?”

That takes us as readers to a line from another poem in this collection. In “Summertime and the Living . . . ,” just two poems earlier, Hayden has described “elders, so harshened after each unrelenting day / that they were shouting-angry,” one way to account for the “chronic angers.” Then again in the very next poem, “The Whipping,” the speaker describes a woman whipping her son until “[she] leans muttering against / a tree, exhausted, purged— / avenged in part for lifelong hidings / she has had to bear.” All three of these poems include this recurring imagery of violence perpetrated on the young as vengeance for the violence life has perpetrated on these adults. So readers’ sympathy is quickened for the boy described in the poem.

But in the final verse, Hayden undercuts our nearly stereotypical and easy sympathy:

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?

In these few lines, he captures the self-centeredness of youth and the pathos of both adult and child locked in miscommunication. Polishing his son’s shoes goes beyond the expectation of “manhood,” in providing warmth for the family. It is arguably a tender gesture. The father can offer only these tender acts against his “chronic angers.” Yet the boy is indifferent to the father’s acts of tenderness. Neither seems to understand the other.

So the poem ends hauntingly, repeating, as if the speaker himself not only regretful but slightly bewildered and chagrined by the insensitivity of youth. He repeats his question, “what did I know, what did I know . . . ?” And we, too, are challenged to ask ourselves what signs we have been missing. What acts of love have we failed to see?

For Discussion or Writing
1. Hayden starts this poem in the middle— “Sundays, too. . . .” Why? What does that reveal about the character of the father and the life this family lives?

2. What is the overall emotional tone of this poem? What details lead you to that conclusion? How do words like indifference, chronic angers, and austere contribute to that tone? Why?