Love
can be an emotion that is not expressed or recognized easily. There
are many “types” of love, and the comprehension of the word
“love” itself is quite subjective to an individual’s experience
or understanding, but there is perhaps no version of love quite as
unrivaled in it’s complexity than that version which we see in
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden – the love between
father and child. Hayden expresses an adult’s lament for not
recognizing the love of a father when the adult was still a child,
and in his childhood recollection the adult conveys the love that the
father did not explicitly state.
In
the poem the adult tells of a routine that begins with the father
waking up early on Sunday mornings, as he does every morning (“Sunday
too my father got up early”) (Hayden 1), when the “blueblack
cold” (Hayden 2) of the time before dawn is still present in the
house and the adult, then a child, is still asleep. We learn that
the father works a laborious job during the week, coming home with “…
cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather…”
(Hayden 3-4), and while many people would certainly be content to
alleviate the physical weariness during the weekend, this man chooses
to get out of bed even on the days when he is not at work.
So,
why do it? Why suffer, as it were, and give up the opportunity to
rest? In the fourth and fifth lines of that first stanza we are
given a simple explanation for the father braving the cold and his
physical exhaustion: to make “banked fires blaze…” (Hayden 5).
The fire in the fireplace or stove (the means is not specified) must
be tended in order to bring warmth to the household and his child.
The father’s warming the house is seemingly nothing extraordinary,
and some could argue that he does it out of a sense of fatherly duty
rather than a loving affection for the child. But is fatherly duty
not simply an expression of the love for a father’s children? The
final sentence in the stanza, “… No one ever thanked him”
(Hayden 5), demonstrates that the adult considered it an important
act that went beyond mere duty – while it is not explicitly stated,
bringing warmth his child is viewed as an act of love. There is
another such moment of realization on the adult’s part when he
speaks of the father polishing his “…good shoes as well”
(Hayden 12) in the third line of the final stanza. It is another
seemingly simple part of the routine, and one that most certainly
could have been required of the child, but the father chooses once
again to do it for reasons that the child was unaware of – love.
There
is a more subtle aspect to the routine that is not as delineated when
compared to what is plainly stated in the poem. The title itself,
“Those Winter Sundays,” is perhaps the biggest hint, but as we
read into the poem there are many supporting terms and lines that
give credence the idea that this father is preparing his child for an
important weekly event: church on Sundays. In the second and third
lines of the second stanza we read, “When the rooms were warm, he’d
call, / and slowly I would rise and dress…” What reason could
there be for waking up early on a Sunday morning? Again, we are not
explicitly told, but the evidence for this is then strengthened when
one considers that the father polished his good shoes. We are faced
with a child being woken up on a Sunday morning, called by his father
to specifically rise and get dressed, then presented with a freshly
polished pair of good shoes. It certainly does sound like
preparation for Sunday church. As is written in the Bible, “Keep
the sabbath day to sanctify it…” (King James Version Deut. 5:12).
This father could very well be preparing his child to attend church,
a tradition that many people around the world believe improves morals
and character, among other positive qualities. A loving father,
then, would take his child to Sunday church because he cares for the
child and wants to help improve the child’s life.
As
mentioned, when the temperature reached comfortable levels the father
would call to the child to wake up and get dressed. Hayden’s
persona of the regretful adult conveys waking up to the sound of the
wood in the fire crackling, or as the adult recalls the sound of
“cold splintering, breaking” (Hayden 6), certainly a sharp
contrast to the warmth of a fire. The vivid description shows how he
perceived the sounds of his father’s early morning labors as a
child. Following the call the child would rise and get dressed,
slowly and without any particular urgency as the child had a fear of
the “chronic angers of that house” (Hayden 9). We are never told
what these “angers” could be, but as the only other prominent
character in the poem is the father we can infer that the father
instilled a type of fear in the child. It is common for children to
fear their father, who is often seen as the stern figure that asserts
authority over his children. As the French philosopher Joseph
Joubert wrote in his notebooks, “Love and fear. Everything the
father of a family says must inspire one or the other” (“Joseph
Joubert”), and in this case it appears the father inspired fear.
The father may be performing his fatherly duty by taking care of his
child, but the child is unable to interpret the father’s actions as
symbols of his love, and resorts to “Speaking indifferently to
him…” (Hayden 10). Thus, the father’s love goes unrecognized.
It
is not until the final stanza of the poem, in the final two lines,
that the adult expresses his feelings about not recognizing the
father’s love until adulthood: “What did I know, what did I know
/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (Hayden 13-14). The
adult’s regret is laid out before us when he asks himself what he
knew, for he was only a child and could not know that all that the
father did for the child was done out of love. He comes to
understand that love is not as easy to obtain when one is in a high
“office,” or place of authority. As the authority figure the
father helped his child as best he could, loving him all the while,
but never able to express the love in a manner that the child could
recognize.
Works Cited
The Criswell Study Bible: King James Version.
Ed. W. A. Criswell. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1979.
Hayden, Robert. “Those Winter Sundays.”
Living Literature: An Introduction to
Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed.
John C. Brereton. New York: Longman, 2007. 1083.
“Joseph Joubert.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 13
Feb 2008, 23:21 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 24 Mar 2008.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Joubert&oldid=191285803>.