Craft Response 8

#10

Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” is a three stanza, fourteen lines poem. In this poem there is movement throughout the poem that can be followed as a storyline.

The first stanza shows the father of the speaker. This is where this story starts, where the flow of the poem begins. “Sundays too my father go up early,” the speaker tells us in line one. The speaker goes on to tell us that the father lights all the fires so that the house would be warm when everyone else would not be cold when they got up. The speaker tells us that even though the father’s “hands ached/ from labor in the weekday,” (line 3-4) that he made the fires. “No one ever thanked him,” (line 5).

The third and final stanza shows the ending of the poem’s story. The speaker is reflecting almost on the full tale and asks the question, in the final two lines, “What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?” the speaker here is wondering how he could know that his father did this every Sunday for him and never acknowledged it. The speaker never thanks he “Who had driven out the cold/ and polished [his] good shoes as well,” (lines 13-14). To close the story the speaker is now aware of the love that the father felt towards him and the rest of the household because he did this every week for them, now he realizes that love. the speaker realizes that the father got up and was all alone so that he could do this for his family even though they never thanked him for this act of kindness.

In the second stanza the speaker gets the readers from the beginning of the story to the end of it. The first stanza expressed the father’s actions, the last expressed the speaker’s reflections of this action and the second stanza expresses the speakers actions at the time of this loving act. The speaker would wake as the house warmed after the father lit the fires and once his father called only then, “slowly [he] would rise and dress,” (line 8). The speaker gives us a small hint in line 9 that maybe the father wasn’t always so caring by saying, “fearing the chronic angers of that house”. Even though the speaker adds that the father was maybe harsher in the week, on Sundays the father would still rise to warm the house and that is what the speaker remembers. It is the love and care that the father gave, not the harshness or “chronic angers of that house,” (line 9) that the speaker is trying to show through these lines.

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. At the age of 16 Thoreau attended Harvard. His older brother, John who was a teacher, helped him pay for his tuition. While in Harvard he was introduced to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became his main influence. In 1842 he was traumatized with the death of his brother, John. After that he worked for his father for a time until 1845 when he went to Walden Pond and built a cabin on land that was owned by Emerson. Thoreau lived in the woods at Walden Pond for two years, two months and two days before he returned to Concord to work with his father again. While back in Concord, Thoreau rewrote his most known work, Walden, seven times before attempting to publish it. Also, in the 1850s, Thoreau was known to be an antislavery activist; he also looked after night passengers of the Underground Railroad who passed through Concord. Henry David Thoreau died in 1862 at the age of 44 from tuberculosis.

“Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you’ll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you’ll be in as much trouble as I am.” –Henry David Thoreau.