Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays"

Thoughts on grief and love and language.

Those Winter Sundays

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. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden (Liveright, 1966)

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I know it’s no longer winter, and I know it is a mild and humid day in New York as I write this, but this will always be one of my absolute favorite poems. And I think I’ve stayed away from writing about it because, well, so much has been written about it. It’s widely-anthologized (maybe one of the most widely anthologized?), and better and more critical minds than mine have parsed it and found so much beauty within it. But for some reason, it’s stuck in my head again, and now I am here, sitting in my chair, writing about it.

Perhaps one reason I am thinking of this poem is because it was one of the first — if not the first — poems to show me the myriad ways in which a poem can be itself. I don’t think I realized that when I first read it. When I first read this poem, I was obsessed — as I still am, and maybe will always be — with sonship, with the sad and troublesomely masculine silence that is often associated with it. And when I first read this poem, and encountered its final lines, the loneliness of such a sad, internal question echoed for so long in me.

That feeling — that lonely feeling of regret — presents itself so clearly here, in part because of Hayden’s overt structure, this three-part thing that I think of as:

1. What the speaker knows (“Sundays too my father got up early…”)

2. What the speaker witnesses (“I’d wake and hear the cold splintering…”)

3. What the speaker does (“Speaking indifferently to him…”)

In such a way, the poem grows with guilt. It calls to mind a few lines from Philip Levine’s “What Work Is” — another poem about silence, and how it hinders love:

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek?

In both poems — because of the weight of imagery — we, as readers, become aware of how much the speaker knows. Such knowledge accumulates and becomes a weight — growing heavier with time — instead of something beautiful. It becomes a weight that can only be turned to grace through one word: love. Think again of those first lines of Hayden’s poem:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold

The speaker doesn’t place himself here; rather, such lines are spoken from a kind of distance. The distance of sleep — those hours when the speaker, a son, is in bed, but still — upon waking — knows the kind of labor the father has undertaken. It’s a remarkable way to begin this poem, because it shows — especially when we reach the poem’s final question — how close the son is to the father, how much he knows of the father’s work. And yet, the poem still ends:

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

Thematically, this poem operates and garners its energy through this tension. It’s a sonnet, right? And it’s a sonnet that spends twelve lines describing in such detail the difficulty of the father’s work — the kind of detail that comes from real acts of witness — before offering two lines that show how little knowledge that witness has offered. And there’s real sorrow there. Real pain. It’s the sorrow of distance despite closeness. The sorrow of solitude despite intimacy.

As a teacher, I sometimes use a framework for conflict resolution known as a “W.O.W. Conversation” — which was something offered to me by this organization called Ramapo. The acronym stands for: What Happened, Own Up, What’s Next. It’s a simple way to move toward an understanding of harm without a kind of top-down judgement that might render such a conversation impossible.

And it’s funny, because this poem operates within the first two phrases of the acronym. From the speaker, we get a sense of what is happening: the father’s unseen and unvalued labor. And we also get a sense of what the speaker wants to own up to: their lack of appreciation for the father’s love. And I think what then becomes moving about this poem is the lack of resolution. There is no what’s next. Instead, Hayden ends the poem on a question, a question full of regret, and then he lets the blank space gather. We don’t know, as readers, what the son does with this knowledge. We don’t know if his guilt accumulates and remains silent and accumulates even further. We don’t know if any love is eventually expressed. And we don’t know, either, if it’s too late. Which is what I often think, and what moves this poem into a realm of wild sorrow. We don’t know if there’s no opportunity for resolution, if this grief must go unexpressed, and the love of the father must go unacknowledged.

And so I love the way Hayden’s poem offers structure to those big feelings of regret and grief and love and value and acknowledgment. I love the way he uses a sonnet — this argumentative form, so often arguing towards a desire for requited love — and places it inside the self, and then gestures it toward silence. Rather than a speaker who projects love, Hayden’s poem has a speaker who realizes he hasn’t returned the love that has been offered to him day after day. It’s like a sonnet in negative. I love the way the poem seems to say I knew, I knew, I knew…I didn’t know. What better way is there to describe some enduring frustration at the heart of the human condition? This idea that we know our lives until we don’t. This sorrow that comes when we realize our love just a little bit too late.

That was the first reason I fell in love with this poem. The second reason had to do with how the poem articulated those aforementioned feelings. It’s there from the moment the poem begins. Look at the first stanza and notice these words: blueblack, cold, cracked, ached, banked. Such words — harsh, sharp, and piercing — give the description of the father’s labor a sense of real feeling. They sound out the cold, and make the mouth take on the curt shape of pain. And they sound it out so well. I mean, what better lines of poetry are there than these:

with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

When you speak these lines aloud, they hold the truth of what they are describing in your mouth. They cut at your throat. They double back. And they rhyme, too, toward the end. They exist as one of those beautiful testaments to what can happen as a result of a poem — the way something can be both a delight to read, and a sorrow to feel.

Such onomatopoetic words echo later — breaking, chronic — before softening away at the son’s regret, the long and drawn out lowness of the repeated phrase what did I know?

This isn’t news, I don’t think, to anyone who has read this poem closely. It’s a poem that is often used as a model for the way in which sound can convey meaning. But whether or not it’s news to you or anyone doesn’t change the fact that this poem does employ sound to convey meaning. And when that realization occurred to me for the first time, it was a godsend. It made the world sing. Like, really. It made the world sing. Words like whisper began to whisper to me. The creak of a door sounded like the creak of a door. Language was no longer just a placeholder for feeling. It could be feeling itself.

I’ve taught this poem more than a few times, and every time I do, I pair it with a little exercise that I learned from someone years and years ago whose name I don’t remember, sadly. I forget if I’ve mentioned this before, but if I have, bear with me. It goes like this.

First, draw a big shape on a board or a huge piece of paper. It should look something like this:

Yeah, that’s right. It should look like that. And then draw a second shape that looks a bit like this:

Then, ask your students to come up with absolute nonsense words to name the two shapes. Do it now. See what happens. I’ll wait. As a side note, I’ve done this exercise in both my years of being a college adjunct and my current years of being a high school teacher. It works almost every time, in a way that is both engaging and playful. I don’t think anyone is too old or too serious for this kind of play.

Aside from a few sometimes-funny out-of-left-field answers, you’ll probably get a bunch of words like, let’s say, bloobermuffin, floof, pufferjuff, and wooooolimoof for the first one. And then maybe a bunch of words like zingerzag, jaggedrage, crinkyzink, and cracklezap for the second one.

Look again at the shapes and then the nonsense words that correspond to each shape, and it makes sense, right? The words enact the meaning of each shape, if each shape could have meaning. The soft, puffy edges of the first shape give rise to the soft vowel sounds of the nonsense words above. The hard sharpness of the second shape is reflected in the quick and cutting consonance of the words ascribed to it. Extend that out to language as a whole, and you’ll see such a relationship play out on a larger scale. Words become both instrument and music; they become the things that name a feeling and the things that are feeling themselves. A word like sorrow becomes its own minor chord. A word like crash reverberates like a cymbal on a drum. Thunder thunders in the mouth, and lightning jumps quickly off of the tongue.

Hayden’s poem taught me this, this essential and fundamental thing. It made the world feel a little bit more like music, which is one of the great joys of being alive — this sense of music everywhere. And, in so doing, it also taught me something about learning. It taught me about the way that knowledge is not some linear thing, that rather it is something radial, filled with connective tissue along the way. Learning this little thing about language didn’t lead me to some other truth further down the line. No. It just widened some of the world for me. Sometimes being alive in this world is like looking straight up at the night sky for a long time. You find the first stars you see and affix your gaze to them, and then your periphery seems to light up and fill with other stars. The world brightens, in this way, the longer you look at it, and the more you pay attention. Most things are illuminated by their own kind of light. The darkness that obscures such light is mostly our own collective doing. It takes work to un-obscure light. It takes poetry, too.

And then, well, it comes back to theme, doesn’t it? I knew, I knew, I knew…I didn’t know. When I think of Hayden’s speaker — a son, perhaps older, perhaps caught in the inability to speak his love to the person he loves the most — I think of how often I have witnessed without acknowledgement. I think of how often the world itself, and the people in it, are like the speaker’s father — these people laboring out of love for those whom they love. We use language often, I think, to point out the labor but not the love. We use language often to say what is happening without saying why we value or don’t value what is happening, and who is making it happen, and who it is happening to.

This makes me think of a passage on love that I recently read in John Berger’s On Looking:

The person loved is the being who continues when the person’s own actions and egocentricity have been dissolved. Love recognises a person before the act and the same person after it. It invests this person with a value which is intranslatable into virtue.

The son in Hayden’s poem fails to use love to recognize his father. He invests his father’s acts with value, but not the father himself. Not until time has passed, until — maybe — it is too late. To recognize love too late must be one of the greatest sorrows of being alive. It’s why I feel such a sadness for the father in today’s poem, and also such a sadness for the son.

What can I say? A few weeks ago, my father was in town to take care of my brother, who came to New York for hip surgery. I met the two of them the next day, as my father guided my brother on his first real walk, crutches and all. They moved so slow. The city moved around them — incessant, unceasing. I saw my father stand with both hands up in almost the middle of an avenue to halt a car so that my brother could make his way across the street. It was almost a year ago when my father did the same for me, after my own surgery. He is a couple years away from 80. Years ago, I helped take off his socks and get him into bed after he had both hips replaced. He is old, complicated, beautiful. He always shows up. Sometimes, on the phone, instead of saying I love you, I say we love you. I don’t know who the we is, but lately I have come to think of the we as all of my selves — past, present, and future — trying to tell him that he is seen.