along and fight.  The speaker himself could be arguing with the mother or father.

 1st Stanza

The speaker sees his father in his memory and recalls this particular Sunday morning. The word too implies that the father gets up early every day…He dresses in the biting cold.  His hands are cracked open from the weather and hard work that he does every day.  The father lights the stoves and fireplaces to warm the rooms for his family. 

The most important statement in this stanza comes from the speaker. It is a present reverence for his father.  No one thanked his father for getting up and making the house warm. The speaker feels regret for the lack of gratitude expressed to his parent.

2nd Stanza

When the speaker woke up, he hears the house reacting to the warmth from the fires. His father calls out to the child.  Slowly, the child would dress dreading the “chronic angers of that house.” This phrase reflects the tone of the poem.  Initially, the poem seems to be only about the speaker remembering that no one said anything to the father about his warming up the house.

Now something new enters the scene.  The house holds strong, angry feelings.  The poet gives no more information, but the words that he choses help the reader to understand the meanings.

The word chronic means long-lasting, continuing, enduring, and persistent.  This anger has been an on-going problem in the house.  Instead of saying the home or this house, he uses is “that house.” This phrase also emphasizes that the child and the present speaker divorce themselves from the house that holds all of this wrath, rage, or resentment.

The child does not just dread the habitual rage, but rather fears it indicating that there may be violence involved or screaming.  The poet leaves it the imagination.

3rd Stanza

The child shows no emotion toward his father when he speaks to him.  The man warms the house and even polishs his shoes for him.  The parent obviously loves the child. 

The speaker of the present almost cries out:

“What did I know, what did I know

Of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Another important phrase comes from the last line of the poem.

Again the poet’s word choice suggests that the narrator regrets that he did not understand the somber but solitary job of a parent.  The speaker apparently now understands what a small “Thank You” might have meant to his father.  The poem has an “If only…” tone; however, the anger in the house may have prevented the child from relating in a positive way to his father.

The poem “Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden (whose name at birth was Asa Bundy Sheffey) explores a number of different themes. Two of the most obvious are love and ingratitude.

Love is a theme right from beginning line.  The fact that the speaker’s father arose early on “winter Sundays” to build fires while his son still lay in bed is vivid evidence of the father’s love for his family, including his son. The father performs this ritual every winter day, even on a day when, after a long, hard week of work he might have expected someone else to undertake this necessary task. Many fathers, in fact, would have expected the son himself to arise and make the fire, perhaps in order to teach the son how to take on the responsibilities of an adult.

Instead, this father communicates his love not overtly, in words, but symbolically, through his behavior. He calls no great attention to his love; he simply enacts it. The literal warmth of the fire symbolizes the figurative warmth of the father’s affection, despite the fact that the house is sometimes full of “chronic angers” (9), perhaps between the speaker’s parents.

Significantly, only when the rooms are “warm” does the father call the son to arise; he waits until the home is at least physically comfortable before he seeks his son’s presence.  He does not rush the son (“slowly I would rise and dress” [8]), perhaps because he realizes that the house, despite its physical warmth, is sometimes full of emotional coldness and tension. The father also shows an extra sign of love toward his son. Not only had the father “driven out the cold,” but he had also “polished [the son’s] good shoes as well” (11-12).

Yet the poem explores the theme of love in other ways as well.  Now that the speaker is older himself, he is better able to appreciate -- and celebrate in words -- the quiet love that his father demonstrated so silently but meaningfully in the past.  The poem itself is a verbal expression of love by the son for the father. The speaker now regrets that he, apparently like other members of the family, took the father’s love for granted and showed no gratitude for it at the time: “No one ever thanked him” (5). The poem is the speaker’s form of belated thanks, of belated reciprocal love, toward (and for) the father. The poem is also a kind of rebuke to the speaker’s younger self, as when he asks, in the work’s final lines,

What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

These lines, in fact, unite the theme of love with another major theme of the poem: ingratitude, or at least the human tendency to take the love of others (especially family members, ironically) for granted. The statement in line 4 that “No one ever thanked” the father for his efforts is the first explicit evidence of the theme, but it appears as well, perhaps, in the reference to the home’s “chronic angers” (9), and it is implied again in the speaker’s reference, in line 10, to his own early indifference toward his father’s loving acts.  Finally, the theme is stated openly in the work's closing lines (already quoted above). The entire poem is an expression of belated loving thanks for a love that had earlier been greeted with ingratitude and taken too much for granted.

Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” can evoke a number of emotions and beliefs.  Thus, the first four lines of the poem can evoke feelings of cold and discomfort. These lines seem to reflect the father’s belief that he owes it to his child to provide that child with comfort, even if doing so causes discomfort and even pain to the father himself. Line five suggests a feeling of warmth, but this line already seems to imply the belief that people deserve thanks when they work to help others. Already in line 5 one can begin to sense the speaker’s feelings of regret, shame, and self-reproach – emotions that become fully explicit at the very end of the poem. This poem, in a sense, is a response to the speaker’s implied belief that people should be thanked when they cause discomfort to themselves in order to comfort others.  This poem is one way by which the speaker expresses belated thanks.

Lines 6-9 again emphasize the feelings of cold, but feelings of warmth are much more prominent in these lines. The emotions implied here are at first feelings of both literal and figurative warmth, but then the reference to “chronic angers” implies emotions of fear, apprehension, tension, and discomfort.  Clearly these lines also imply the belief that it would be best if such emotions did not exist:

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house  . . . .

Line 10 again seems to imply an emotion of present self-reproach, as if the speaker now regrets speaking “indifferently” to his father when he was a boy.  The poem thus implies once again the belief that people owe respect and thanks to those who help them. Yet the word “indifferently” may also imply an emotion of latent hostility or at least wariness by the boy toward the father when the boy was a boy.  Or perhaps that word simply implies an emotion of complacency, of taking the father for granted.

By the time we reach lines 11-14 (the poem, significantly, is a sonnet – a kind of poetry associated with love), feelings of gratitude and also of shame become more and more obvious.  The boy, speaking now as a man, suggests increasingly clearly the love he received from his father and the love and respect he now feels for his father in return.  The emotion of love (from both father and son) is especially emphasized in the final two lines, and those lines also imply that love should be reciprocal, not merely offered by one person to another. Emotions and beliefs are tightly bound together in this poem, with each evoking and reinforcing the other.

There are a few important clues about the poet's attitude that appear both in the poem and from the very start in the title.  The title itself suggests a look backwards, foreshadowing the particular lines in the poem itself that demonstrate how the speaker's attitude has changed since the time depicted in the poem.

The main indications come in the final stanza of the poem.  The juxtaposition of the image of the younger man "speaking indifferently to" his father and the image of the father, tired from his labors making sure to perform one more, that of "driv[ing] out the cold" makes it clear that the younger man is no longer indifferent to this particular labor of love.  He did not notice it then, did not thank him, but he remembers it now.

Of course the last line with its rhetorical question is the most poignant:

What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

In this poem, an adult reflects on his childhood relationship with his father, suggesting that he did not, then, understand how his father showed his love or that there are different ways of showing love that may not look like love. Evidently, the speaker’s father was not a warm and cuddly, affectionate person who showed his love with hugs and words. Instead, the speaker’s father showed his love by getting up early, even on Sundays (the one day of the week when he didn’t have to go to work), so that he could light the fires which would warm the house and keep his family more comfortable. Though his hands likely “ached” from the work he did during the week, the speaker’s father would make up the fires to break up the cold, only calling to wake up his family when the house was finally warm.

Because the speaker, as a child, did not appreciate his father’s sacrifices or see them as evidence of his father’s love, he would speak “indifferently” to his father, never bothering to thank the man for his consideration. Perhaps the speaker’s father was unhappy, as the speaker refers to “the chronic angers of that house” as though his father was always grouchy or cross. Ultimately, the speaker concludes that, at the time, he did not realize the myriad ways one could show their love, that love actually often looks “austere and lonely” rather than, for example, joyful and affectionate.