In "Those Winter Sundays", how does the speaker's feelings about his father and home change from youth to adulthood?
The structure of the poem and the way the speaker addresses the topic mirror the actual progression of feelings that the speaker has. As such it begins with the setting of the scene, the fact that his father arose early on Sundays just as he did on weekdays. The speaker notes that his hands are cracked and worn from the hard labor he does throughout the week and that he does so to bring the fires to a blaze to warm the cold house.
The speaker then places himself in the setting, lying in bed waiting for the chill to be banished by the fire but then quickly responding to his father's call, fearing his anger which apparently often featured in the home.
It is in the final stanza that the speaker's awareness of what his father did has changed as he too has grown to be a man. He notes that he spoke to him indifferently as any young man often does to his father, notes that he knew nothing of the love that was so obvious in his father's actions. The question he asks is "what did I know," implying the absence of knowledge then that has been changed now to show him too late the love he was shown as a young man.
How do images and word choice in "Those Winter Sundays" emphasize the speaker's changing feelings towards his father?
The answer to this question lies in the comparison between the speaker as he remembers himself thinking and acting as a child and then how he looks back on his childhood and his father's act of love as an adult.
Initially, as a child, the speaker was blind to what his father did. The line "No one ever thanked him" supports this, as nobody ever thought for one minute of what it must have cost his father to get up so early in the intense cold and warm the house up for everybody else. In addition, the speaker remembers descending and then speaking "indifferently" to his father, in spite of the fact that he had polished his shoes as well as warming up the house.
It is only now, as an adult, that the speaker is able to look back and reflect on his father's incredible sacrificial love and how he displayed that through braving the "chronic angers" of the house that he himself feared to brave. This change of attitude is reflected in the last two lines of the poem:
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?The reference in the last line to the "austere" and "lonely offices" of love shows the way in which the speaker has matured and developed. Only with age is he able to look back and recognise how wonderful his father was for demonstrating the "lonely offices" of love.
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