Poetica: "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden
By Lanie Anderson
Welcome to Poetica, the monthly poetry column of Shadowlands Dispatch! This month, we are pleased to feature “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, followed by an analysis and reflection by Lanie Anderson, Shadowlands Dispatch Editor-in-Chief.
For a deeper dive into this poem, check out Chapter 4 of Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church by Abram Van Engen. The Society for Women of Letters will also host a Bluestocking Salon discussion on Tuesday, May 13, on Word Made Fresh. If you are not currently a member but would like to join one of our salons, your first Bluestocking Salon is always free. Please click HERE to email Lanie if you would like to participate!
Those Winter Sundays
By Robert Hayden (August 4, 1913—February 25, 1980)
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would raise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
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?
Analysis and Reflection
By Lanie Anderson
Although poets aren’t always writing from their personal experiences, we can confidently say that Robert Hayden was well acquainted with a father’s “chronic angers.” Named “Asa Bundy Sheffey” by his parents, Hayden grew up in the Paradise Valley neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan. His parents were poor and often fought in front of Hayden. He also suffered physical abuse at the hands of his father and was raised partly by foster parents with the last name “Hayden.”
Hayden was severely nearsighted, which made participation in sports nearly impossible. He turned to reading instead. Hayden earned a master’s degree in 1942 from the University of Michigan where he studied under W.H. Auden, who heavily influenced his life and work as a professor and poet.
Hayden was the first African American faculty member in the university’s English department. In 1976, he also became the first African American appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, now known as the United States Poet Laureate. “Those Winter Sundays” is one of the most anthologized American poems of the twentieth century.
But why?
The 14-line sonnet—with its brilliant uses of assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds), consonance (the repetition of consonant sounds), internal rhyme (rhymes that don’t occur at the end of its lines), and rich stanzas that act like different “rooms” of a house—provide generous material for an English teacher’s poetry unit.
But I think this poem is so powerful because it “travels well,” as Abram Van Engen writes in his latest book Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church:
[This poem] meets so many different readers. Each one encounters it with their own associations, their own memories, their own childhood, their own parents. It sends them searching through the past for acts of love; it speaks of gratitude in the midst of hardship. It neither ignores the difficult and severe circumstances of the household, nor neglects the way this father tried to love his son. A poem lives in the place where text and reader meet, and that place is going to differ for every single person who reads the poem.1
I’m writing this column on the heels of a weekend women’s retreat where I spoke about forgiveness. In one of our sessions, I shared Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sundays.” Hayden was not a follower of Christ; his wife introduced him to the Bahá'í Faith, which he joined in the 1940s. However, Christian themes of compassion and forgiveness run throughout the poem, perhaps elaborating on them better than I could in my own words, which is why it seemed so fitting.
A single phrase in this poem signals to readers that relationships were strained in the narrator’s home as a child: he woke each morning, “fearing the chronic angers of that house.” Like the “blueblack cold” of “those winter Sundays,” we get the sense that relationships in his home were just as frigid. Anger was chronic, recurring repeatedly, probably without repentance.
However, as an adult, the narrator is moved by compassion for the father he knew as a child, although we don’t know what started it. Does the narrator become a father? Does his own interactions with his children complicate the image from his childhood he’s had of his father until now? The first line says, “Sundays too my father got up early.” Does this mean that the narrator now gets up early on Sundays to care for his children? Or is the reading more straightforward? Did his father simply get up early every day, including Sundays?
We don’t know the answers to these questions, but, for whatever reason, the narrator’s recollection of his father is more complex now. Despite his father’s “chronic angers,” the narrator is able to appreciate what his father got right—how he “made / banked fires blaze” to warm their home and “polished my good shoes as well.” Hayden ended the poem with a striking question:
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
His repetition of “What did I know” is significant, as Engen notes in Word Made Fresh:
Without the repetition, it would be a single question, simply stated. The poem would still be good, no doubt, but it would lose that sense of realization—the recognition by the writer in the process of writing: ‘What did I know, what did I know…’ As Frost and Phillips and countless other poets have claimed, poets write themselves into recognition. They move from delight to wisdom, from pleasure to clarification, from simple remembrance to complex recognition. And we get all that movement in ‘Those Winter Sundays’—which, in turn, enables all those same movements in the reader as well.2
The narrator’s distance from his childhood and compassion for his father enable him to see and appreciate “love’s austere and lonely offices” with fresh eyes, making his father a more complex figure from his past than he realized.
So what does this poem have to do with forgiveness?
If the Christian command to forgive means to release someone from a debt, one of the ways we refuse forgiveness is by seeing someone one-dimensionally. In his book, Making Sense of Forgiveness: Moving from Hurt Toward Hope, Brad Hambrick, writes that Christian forgiveness has an intrapersonal dimension:
Intrapersonal means within (intra) ourselves (personal). We can leverage an offense against someone within our mind and attitudes. What does this look like? It looks like writing a narrative about this person that reduces them to their offense and evaluates the rest of their life through the lens of their offense… An intrapersonal effect of forgiving is allowing someone to become a three-dimensional character—someone with multiple facets to their personhood, any of which may be most relevant to a given situation.3
The narrator of this poem—maybe Hayden himself—is able to look back after all these years (forgiveness is a process that can take years!) and see his father as a three-dimensional character: someone with “chronic angers” who also made “banked fires blaze” to warm his family.
The father’s three-dimensional nature doesn’t excuse his sin or his need to repent of it. However, the poem’s power comes from its implicit way of asking this question of us all: “What do I know?”
The ability to humbly accept our finite knowledge of another person eases us, like it did for Hayden, toward forgiveness of the gravest sins. It also helps us to see more clearly our own temptations and sins, and, consequently, to behold the truth and beauty of our own hard-won redemption by our Lord:
Two wonders here that I confess
My worth and my unworthiness
My value fixed, my ransom paid
At the cross4
—Lanie Anderson is Editor-in-Chief of Shadowlands Dispatch and a member of The Society for Women of Letters Leadership Council. She earned her MDiv with a specialization in Christian Apologetics from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and also holds a BA in English from the University of Mississippi. Lanie has written for Christianity Today and The Center for Faith and Culture. She currently stays home with her two children and works remotely as a writer, editor, and digital marketer.
Abram Van Engen, Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2024), 104.
Ibid., 102.
Brad Hambrick, Making Sense of Forgiveness: Moving from Hurt Toward Hope (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2021), 14.
Keith and Kristyn Getty, “My Worth Is Not In What I Own,” Track 2 on The Greengrass Session, Getty Music, 2014.
This was lovely. Thank you for another thoughtful analysis.