Analyse de poème Those Winter Sundays

Those Winter Summer

Background information

This poem was written by Robert Hayden in 1962. He was born in 1913 and passed away in 1980. He was reased by a foster family, because his parents separated soon before he was born.

Structure

We can see that the poem is compose of 3 stranzas and has only 5 sentences, in the first stranza and the third one there is 5 lines and in the second 4 lines. The lines are about the same length. The last line of the second stranza continue on the first line of the third stranza. And the poem finish by a question.

Mood

This poem have several themes :

• Sacrifice : dad has to wake up early, even on Sunday, to either go to work or polished his good shoes
• Memories : the use of the word “those” in the title and the fact that most of the verbs poem are in the past
• Work : as the words “labor”(l.4)  and “offices”(l.14). We can tell that the dad’s work is physical because of the use of the expressions “cracked hands” and “offices”.
• Regrets : “What did I know, what did I know”(l.13). I find that this line show how much the speaker has gained in maturity over the time.

The use of colors in l.2 “blueblack cold” can have two interpretations :

• Cold
• Sadness (mood)

So mood of this poem is sadness.

Imagery

In this poem, I find that the words “cracked hands” (l.3) have such an important impact. They show us that the dad’s work is physical and that he probably work very hard to get enough money for the speaker and him. It also symbolize the sacrifices the dad had to make, such as getting up early even on Sundays. In the line 6 we can find the expression “cold splintering, breaking”, after reading this we can easily imagine how cold the winters must have been.

Language

There is metaphore on line 9 “fearing the chronic angers of that house”. Of course it isn’t really the house that is angry but rather the dad. We can spote an assonance in the last line “love” and “lonely”. The expression “blueblack” is an plosive consonants. It make the word heavier and give a importance to this word.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can say that the poem is mostly about a memory of how Sundays use to be for the speaker. So it is a sort of flashback.

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