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Those Winter Sundays By Countee Cullen Essay

Decent Essays

This week I looked at the two pieces “Incident” by Countee Cullen, and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. Both of these pieces represent the theme of memoires and the past. Memories can be good, but sometimes they can bring up pain, regret, and many more feelings. Through analyzing these poems, we can really see what the speaker is feeling, and what kind of emotion these memories bring.
In “Incident” by Countee Cullen, Cullen is describing a memory in Baltimore. The speaker is remembering a memorable moment from his past. He experiences racism for the first time on a bus. The speaker of “Incident” is assumed to be an African American man, and he is looking back on a memory from when he was a little boy. “Now I was eight and very small” (pg. 529). It is almost like there are two speakers …show more content…

The setting of the poem is told in the present, but it is about the past. The speaker describes it as very cold. This coldness is connected to the father and child relationship. There is some repetition in the poem. There is not just one cold winter Sunday, but the speaker alludes to there being many of those. Like in “Incident,” it almost seems like there are two speakers. The speaker is both the child who fears his or her father and the adult who is looking back at the father with love, respect, and understanding. There is a lot of maturity in the speaker now. We see this in how the speaker talks about the father. He or she is looking back at the labor the father put in and out if the home. The adult has realized that all of that was a form of love from the father. There is not much that the reader knows about the speaker, but I think that this helps the reader connect. Readers can see themselves in the speaker`s position. As children, we sometimes do not realize that the things our parents do are out of love until we are

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