LITR 5535: American Romanticism
 
Student Poetry Presentation 2006

Monday 16 October:

poetry: Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays," N 2669

poetry reader / discussion leader: Anuruddha Ellakkala

The author of the poem:

Robert Hayden was born in 1913 in Detroit, Michigan.  When he was eighteen months old, his parents ended their marriage in a divorce.  As a matter of fact, his mother gave him to a foster family named the Haydens.  Hereafter he grew up with them in a poor neighborhood called Paradise Valley in Detroit.  However, his foster father encouraged Hayden to overcome his poverty by getting an education. Even though he encountered so many hardship in his life, he eventually became a full time teacher at Fisk University from 1946-1968.  He published his first book, Heart-Shape in the Dust, in 1940 and Ballad of Remembrance in 1962.  Moreover, “he became the first African American to be appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress” in 1976.  From 1968 Robert Hayden worked as an English professor at the University of Michigan until his last breath. He died in 1980 (Norton 2663-64). 

 The poem:

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.                 5

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,                                         10
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?

Definition of the poem:

Some literary theorists suggest that the author should be totally removed from his composition.  However, some say the author cannot separate from the text just as a father cannot separate from his child.  Hayden and his poem "Those Winter Sundays" is like father to his child. The poem cannot be separated from Hayden because it represents his own life experiences in early and later childhood.  Now, the son is a matured person.  He laments over his past.  He memorizes his bitter-sweet past and his foster father.  When his father was alive, Hayden was unable to appreciate his father’s immeasurable dedication for him; even the son failed to communicate with the father affectionately.  The author’s sorrow grows deeper and deeper because he is not his biological father, but he goes beyond a father’s duty by doing all kind of labor for him without a break. But still he treats his father like a servant. In winter days, the father warmed up his son’s room before daybreak and even polished his shoes.  Today, the son laments that he never thanked his father and he never told him how much he loved him. To express his genuine sorrow, Hayden uses basic literary devices of Romanticism such as emotion, inspiration, and imagination. Therefore, the poem “Those Winter Sundays” is a romantic poem and fits into course objective 1a.  Desire and loss, nostalgia, gothic, and sublime are the basic romantic elements of this poem.  In the meantime, I believe if Mark Twain is alive, he cannot pick on Hayden as he did Cooper because the poem can be read as a realistic poem.  

Questions:

1. Do you think this poem more realistic than romantic?  How do you define the poem as realistic?
2. If the poem is romantic, how does relate to course objective 1a.  Desire and loss, nostalgia, gothic, and sublime as basic romantic elements of this poem?
3. How essential to understanding is knowledge of the poet’s life?