Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

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Speaker's Attitude Towards Father in "Those Winter Sundays"

Summary:

In Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," the speaker reflects on his past indifference and lack of appreciation for his father's sacrifices. As a child, he took his father's efforts for granted, speaking indifferently and unaware of the love behind his father's actions. As an adult, he recognizes the "austere and lonely offices" of his father's love, feeling guilt and regret for not understanding the depth of his father's care and the hardships he endured to provide warmth and comfort for the family.

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In Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," what is the speaker's current attitude towards his father?

I like the way your question clearly points towards an understanding of how the speaker is looking back on his childhood from the vantage point of reaching mature adulthood. Thus it is that the poem presents us with two different attitudes and beliefs about the speaker's father. The child that he was obviously took his father's acts of self-sacrificial love for granted. He spoke "indifferently" to his father, and it was clear that he did not know anything of "love's austere and lonely offices."

However, if we think for one moment about how the older and wiser narrator describes what his father did, the respect and love and sense of thankfulness that he has for his father becomes evident. Note the way that he describes the cold as being "blueblack" and stresses the way that his father, even on Sundays, after a week of labour, would get up without fail, even though he was never thanked for this service:

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labour in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

Such details that the speaker as a boy had been blind to clearly indicate the way that the speaker, now he has grown up into an adult, appreciates his father for what he did and recognises the sacrifical acts of love that his father performed, day in and day out, in spite of his own exhaustion, for his son.

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In "Those Winter Sundays," what is the speaker's current attitude toward his father?

This poem is written by an adult speaker looking back on how he thought of his father when he was a child and then comparing that to the understanding and wisdom that age has given him now. The line "No one ever thanked him," at the end of the first stanza, confirms the way in which the speaker and other family members completely took his sacrificial action of getting up so early on Sundays for granted. Although he does it to warm the house up for them before they got up, they never thanked him. In addition, the speaker describes how he spoke "indifferently" to his father when he came down, even though his father has polished his shoes for him.

The final lines of the poem show how greatly the poet's view has changed of his father now he is an adult himself:

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
The sudden change of lexis with the words "austere" and "lonely offices" indicate the change of tone, which is supported by the repetition of "What did I know." These last two lines show that the speaker now feels considerable guilt for the way that he took his father for granted and that now he recognises that what his father did every Sunday morning was a real act of sacrificial love.
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In "Those Winter Sundays," what are the son's feelings towards his father?

Robert Hayden's poem is written as a soliloquy by an adult son who recalls his stern and taciturn, but loving father, a father whose love he has failed to recognize as a boy, partly because of his youth, and partly because of his lack of understanding of the condition of his father as an African-American male and the conflicting emotions--"the chronic angers of that house"--he felt and brought home to his family. Now, as an adult, the son understands that his father communicated his love through his actions:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.

That the father has allowed the son to rise "slowly" indicates that he treats the boy with more tenderness than is apparent since he could have made his son rise and help him with the fires as he started them. Further, the man's gentle feelings of love are certainly apparent in his having polished the boy's good shoes for going to church. And, in the realization that the boy's life will be hard as an adult, perhaps the father is "austere" in his love in order to harden the boy to the "lonely offices" of adult life as an African-American male who must labor with "cracked hands." 

Indeed, the powerful final lines express the man's apprehension of what he did not know as a boy and his regret for his misunderstanding of the extenuating conditions of his father's life, 

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

Thus, the themes of ingratitude and hindsight prevail in this poem about an unacknowledged love by a father for his son.

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What words in "Those Winter Sundays" show the son's feelings toward his father and home?

I would argue that the feelings between father and son were ruled by a contrast in what it means to love. As the previous educator mentions, the adult narrator is able to understand that the father's dutiful attention was a demonstration of love, though nothing else in the poem indicates any affection between father and son.

The following lines are quite telling: "When the rooms were warm, he’d call, / and slowly I would rise and dress, / fearing the chronic angers of that house..." There is an emotive contrast between "warm" and "angers." This suggests that, though the narrator's father was dutiful—ensuring that the house was warm, calling his son to rise in the morning, and polishing his shoes—he was frequently angry or frustrated. In the next line, we learn that the narrator spoke "indifferently to him," which can be attributed both to the ingratitude of a youth and the possible need to steel himself against his father's "chronic angers."

In the final line, he is critical of his former behavior: "What did I know, what did I know / of love's austere and lonely offices?" "Austere" describes the father's dutifulness, which did not immediately translate as love. Hayden manipulates the meaning of "offices" to describe the father's chores as well as to emphasize the solitary nature of this unappreciated work. Father and son occupied different spaces—that of caretaker and the one receiving care.

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What words in "Those Winter Sundays" show the son's feelings toward his father and home?

The question you need to think about is are you talking about the son as an adult looking back on his childhood and his father or the son when he was going through his childhood? The poem makes clear that there is a massive contrast between these two different states.

As a child, the speaker is clearly ungrateful and unaware of what his father does for him, taking it for granted and not thanking him. The narrator says that he spoke "indifferently" to his father when he came downstairs after his father had risen so early and warmed the rooms, and even polished his shoes as well. The first stanza states that "No one ever thanked him" for such labours and evidence of sacrificial love.

However, the change in the narrator as an adult looking back at his childhood now is evident through the last two lines when he asks himself the following question:

What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
The wording of the "lonely offices" of love shows that now the speaker is able to look back upon himself as a child and berate himself for not recognising his father's sacrificial actions and love towards him.
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What do the last two lines of "Those Winter Sundays" reveal about the speaker's view of his father?

The speaker is now an adult, looking back upon his childhood. He shares with the reader all that his father did for him and the rest of the family, getting up alone early in the "blueback cold" (2), with hands that were so chapped the skin cracked, so the family can awake to a warm house.  The narrator realizes that no one in the family thanked him for performing this task.  The speaker also tells us that he spoke "indifferently" (10) to his father, who not only made sure the house was warm, but also polished the narrator's shoes. In the last two lines, he is saying how young and foolish he was, to not understand that love could be expressed quietly, without an audience, by performing simple tasks for the people you love. There is some sense in these lines of a narrator who has come to understand this because he has now had the experience of performing lonely, simple tasks for his family, although it is also possible that this is an insight he has come to just through the maturing process.

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What words in “Those Winter Sundays” show the son's feelings toward his father and home?

In Robert Hayden's “Those Winter Sundays,” a son looks back on his memories of his father with new insight and even some regret. Let's look at this in more detail to get you started on your essay.

The speaker focuses in on a particular set of memories, namely, cold Sunday mornings. He remembers how his father used to get up and dress in the cold, with his hands aching from all his hard work, and to make the house warm for the rest of the family. He would not call the family until the “rooms were warm.”

The speaker did not appreciate his father's efforts at the time. In fact, he seems to have been angry with his father. He would get up and dress, but he feared the “chronic angers of that house.” This does not seem to have been a happy family. There was conflict at home. We do not learn the nature of it, but the speaker apparently blamed his father for it, for he spoke only “indifferently” to his father. He did not thank him for warming the house or for polishing his shoes. There was no appreciation in the speaker as a boy.

Yet now the speaker realizes exactly what his father did for the family. Look at the poem's last two lines: “What did I know, what did I know / of love's austere and lonely offices?” The speaker implies that he knew nothing of such things as a child, but he does now. There is regret here and guilt, too. Notice how he repeats the question. Looking back, probably as an adult, he understands the situation more clearly. He realizes that his father's actions showed his love even if his words did not.

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