32 pages • 1 hour read
Robert HaydenThose Winter Sundays
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Agape Love
“Those Winter Sundays” is a love poem. It is a poem about familial love and fatherly love, but it is also about the concept of love. The poem defines fatherly love as “austere and lonely” (Line 14), suggesting true love is unconditional and giving. It asks nothing in return. It is a service.
Ancient Greeks and biblical scholars call this kind of love agape, and it is often thought of as godly love. The father in the poem—much like the Father in Christian mythology—acts with agape, and the son in the poem—much like humans in the Bible—does not appreciate that love.
The agape relationship between the father and son in the poem is not accidental. As noted earlier in this guide, the poem uses religious imagery to convey the power of the relationship and the impact the father’s actions had on the speaker.
The poem conveys the father’s agape love by using warmth and cold. In the first stanza, the father awakes into “the blueblack cold” (Line 2). “Blueblack” both describes the sky at an early winter hour and provides a description of cold through synesthesia—a poetic device where an author uses one sense to describe another sense. In this case, the speaker describes the physical sensation of cold with the visual imagery of color. The father drives away this blueblack cold with “fires blaze” (Line 5).
In the second stanza, the father only calls the children when “the rooms were warm” (Line 7). This description is important because it connects the father with the warmth he brings. Not only does he bring the warmth of the literal fire, he also brings the warmth of his love. Though he may be a stereotypically cold man (manly, blue-collar, weathered) and though the house may be cold (literally and figuratively), he creates warmth in the house.
Finally, in the last stanza, the father has “driven out the cold” (Line 11). Every mention of cold and warmth in this poem relates to the father, suggesting he is primarily responsible for this feeling in the home. He is the one who loves his child and protects him from the cold world. And he does this without thanks, demonstrating his selflessness.
Regret
In the last stanza, the speaker expresses regret for how he treated his father. Critics often consider this the most powerful part of the poem, which is because the stanza describes a vivid contrast to the love expressed in the earlier stanzas. While the father loves the child and shows that love through action, the speaker describes himself as being cold in the face of his father’s love. Though the speaker does not describe hating his father, he does describe feeling “indifferent” (Line 10), suggesting he never appreciated his father’s love and actions.
The final stanza flips the speaker’s childhood indifference and replaces it with a more mature regret and understanding. The speaker expresses the transition to adulthood in both the sentiment of the last two lines as well as the language. There is no stanza break between Lines 12-13, but the repetition in Line 13 amplifies the immediate shift from indifference to regret. This is the only line in the poem that repeats a phrase; that repetition draws attention to the shift in attitude.
This is also the traditional location of the volta in a sonnet, which is a turn late in the poem bringing about a new way of seeing the subject or introducing some kind of twist to the poem’s theme. Line 14 completes the volta not only with sentiment but also with language. Hayden uses the word “austere” (Line 14), which is the most literary word in the poem. This and his use of the formal definition of “offices” (Line 14) elevate the line. Not only has the speaker come to realize the error of his younger self, he also signifies his growth to the reader through specific diction choices. These two lines illustrate his understanding of his regret, which acts as a powerful contrast to the rest of the poem only concerned with love.
A person often feels regret because they did not recognize what they had while they had it. In two brief lines, Hayden expresses this complex emotion. The effect is one of sadness but also one of wisdom. The reader is supposed to learn from the speaker’s mistake.
Sacrifice
“Those Winter Sundays” exemplifies Hayden’s Baháʼí faith as well as his Christian upbringing. The Baháʼí faith focuses on the unity of all people, regardless of religion or race. Christianity centers on the caring of others through love and sacrifice. While “Those Winter Sundays” does not directly reference either faith, it does align with certain tenets of both belief systems.
The unity comes from the action of sacrifice. Through sacrifice, people care and look out for one another. Just as the father sacrifices for his child, the child comes to understand the importance of that sacrifice and the power of that love. The child comes to realize love is a lonely office, but that is not something about which to be sad. Even though it is a sad realization, there is power in that office.
The poem views sacrifice as the ultimate manifestation of love. Sacrifice is unconditional, selfless, and holy. The power of the father’s sacrifice has biblical weight because of the poem’s allusions to Christ’s sacrifice for humanity. One might read that and think Hayden sees the father in the poem as Jesus, but that’s not quite the case. Hayden is not saying the father is Jesus, but he is saying that because of his selflessness and sacrifice, his father is Christ like. Ultimately, the message is that sacrifice is a performance of godly love, and such love is necessary for the unity of all people.
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