"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden.
"Other things may change us, but we start and end with family" (Anthony Brandt). Family is vital as it is one of the only things that may stay in someone's life for eternity. Compassionate relationships between family members however, are often taken for granted. In Robert Hayden's poem, "The Winter Sundays" the author shows a strong bond between father and his responsibilities to take care of his family. The poem is written in hindsight as the author is the narrator and son of the father in the poem. Throughout the poem, the son realizes the great love and dedication that his father had to his family and the ignorance the entire family had towards their father's actions. .
To start off, in the first stanza the narrator tells us that his father wakes up early to light a fire in their fireplace in order to feel warm on a chilly winter day. In the first line, the narrator says, "Sundays too" which signifies that the narrator's father wakes up early every day, even on Sundays which, in most cultures, is considered a day of worship and rest. Then, in the second line, the narrator says, "blueblack cold," which shows just how early the father wakes up, while its "blueblack" outside meaning the sun hasn't risen yet. Furthermore, the narrator then describes in lines 3-4 his father's beaten up hands from labor in the weekday. This shows the reader that the father isn't going to work during the weekday to a cushy job; he's doing hard, physical labor and the results of this labor are visible on his skin. Then, in the last line, the narrator addresses that his father "banked fires blaze" or in other words, he lights all of the fires in the fireplaces to warm up their house so that no one else in his family will have to haul themselves out of bed in the "blueblack cold". Finally, the speaker ends this stanza by telling us that no one ever gave his father props for all his efforts.
