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
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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
The poem is written in a unhappy tone somewhat similar to “The Seafarer”. “The Wanderer shows loneliness and a generally dark view of the world. Just like “The Seafarer” the speaker gives many images such as frost and cold weather to show “The Wanderer’s” sorrow. Both “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” use weather to show how the character feels in the poem. Likewise of the common things in “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”,” The Wife's Lament” also has some of the same similarities
Hayden uses the juxtaposition of the cold of the outdoors to the warmth of the home that the writer creates to present the father’s love for his child. Although the father did not demonstrate conventional love for the narrator but proved his unconditional love by putting a roof over the child’s head. The winter night is metaphor for the absence of love. Though the child did not comprehend the love the father had for them, they reminiscence upon how the would be left in the cold if the father did not meet the provisions. So the father’s love was not evident in displays of affection but meeting the needs of the child. Most fathers demonstrate their love in what seems like a harsh manner, working most of the time and not spending quality time to fulfil their first role as a father - the provider. Nevertheless as a transformation take place the role of the father or parent become replicated in the adult child. Through understanding the contribution of the caregiver; once empathic response to the parent increases. Hence it closes the gap of differences that exist within the child parent
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden tells about a child’s indifferent relationship with his father. The poem explains all of the things the father did for his child without being asked or thanked. It then jumps to the child’s point of view and tells what they say as a child as to what they see now as an adult looking back. The child, who is now grown, shows signs of regret as he looks back at how he treated his father, who sounds to have passed away. Finally, in the final lines the speaker realizes that the father’s relationship was filled with love.
The first stanza uses concrete imagery to depict a working man “with cracked hands that ached” (3), the speaker’s father, starting a fire. The second stanza starts with warm connotations of the fire rescuing his home from the cold; however, the stanza ends with the speaker expressing his fear, a figurative coldness, of “the chronic angers of that house” (9). The third stanza completes the epiphany that the final line of the first stanza, “No one ever thanked him” (5) hints at. It is at this point that the speaker understands that his father expresses his love differently. While the speaker was looking for an overt expression of his father’s love, his father, a working man, can only show his love with the means by which he is familiar. To the father, love is an expression of actions, actions that the speaker is oblivious to during his childhood. By the setting being early Sunday morning, it shows that the father’s actions, as a symbol of his love, are omnipresent and supersede his own desire for rest. The final lines of every stanza reflect the speaker’s growing realization that he was indeed loved by his father, that he initially didn’t recognize his father’s actions as an expression of this love, and that his obliviousness to this unfamiliar expression of love helped contribute to what
But when one is to look at the tone in "those Winter Sundays" they may find that it’s very regretful. The adult narrator is remembering the admirable qualities of his dead father. The narrator refers to his father 's with "then with cracked hand that ached/in the weekday weather made/banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him," which demonstrates that the child took the father and his actions for granted, and now, as an adult, the speaker is feeling remorse for it. The narrator copes with the loss of his father and his inability to tell the father that he appreciated the “Sunday ritual” by saying "What did I know, what did I know/of love 's austere and lonely offices.”
4. What happened to the family in “The First Snowfall” is they had lost one of their dear children. The family thought how the big blizzard was wrecking the great tomb in which their child was buried. In the poem “The First Snowfall,” the family began to wonder “I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn where a little headstone stood how the flakes were folding it gently” (17-19). They began to become emotional as the snow was falling and the tomb just laid there in the freezing cold and brought up the poor daughter and the sadness of her death. The family lost one of their daughters and the snow made them remember the awful loss and the tomb being buried.
The warmth that filled the house was something that the son just expected every day, as it was routine. Until later in his life, he did not truly think about the one “who had driven out the cold” (line 11). This powerful line symbolizes the strength and willpower it took for the father to do the daily acts for his family. The persona also uses imagery to represent the strength of the father.
In the poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, the speaker is reflecting on his past with his father, but mainly the Sunday mornings he experienced during his childhood. Throughout the poem, there also happens to be a very dark and possibly even somber tone, which is shown by using several different types of literary devices. Hayden utilizes strong imagery supported by diction and substantial symbolism comprehensively. Furthermore, there are various examples of both alliteration and assonances. The poem does not rhyme and its meter has little to no order. Although the father labors diligently all day long, and he still manages to be a caring person in his son’s life. The poem’s main conflict comes from the son not realizing how good his father actually was to him until he was much older. When the speaker was a young boy, he regarded his father as a callous man due to his stern attitude and apparent lack of proper affection towards him. Now that the son is older, he discovers that even though his father did not express his love in words, he consistently did with his acts of kindness and selflessness.
The speaker of the poem shows regret for misunderstanding his father’s teachings in the past, when his father actually influenced him the most, to do better. ““Those Winter Sundays” is a poem written for Robert Hayden's father. Although at first the poem does not seem to be a great tribute to his father, Hayden's respect and affection for his father breaks through the lines. ”(Sparknotes.com) Robert Hayden's, "Those Winter Sundays", is a poem of a child’s inability to honor and appreciate his father during his upbringing. Having “driven out the cold” and “polishing the speakers’ shoes”; the speaker’s father endures hard labor to make sure the success of his family.
Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sunday’s”, shows how a father of child who goes through bitter working conditions to provide for the ones he loves; the author shows the fathers love and care for the kid in line 18 ,”who had driven in the cold and polished my good shoes as well”, how the father drives through the hazardous weather conditions for his child so they can have the satisfaction of having good shoes supports the love of the father. Also, the statement “…with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze”, is how the father takes so much to work in frigid temperatures but is still coming home to build an ire and make sure his loved ones are warm. The way Hayden’s use of bitter and sharp words such as
It must be really difficult for the kid since the father is so violent and yet the kid still loves him so much and forgives him. Cold and warm in "Those Winter Sunday" on the other hand is a sense of feeling, filled with vivid colors. First, it talks about how "blue-black cold" the weather was, then the father lit up the fire and its light and warm. The narrator focuses on temperature because it is a metaphor for the relationship of his father with him as well. The cold would be the cruelness of the outside world, trying to harm the family then the father comes in, protecting the family by doing all the labor without telling the family because it is the only way he can express his love.
The poem starts with an extremely straightforward line that in any case builds up the subject and the tone of what will take after. The title has as of now recommended the peaceful chilly of "winter Sundays" and this first line adds to it the thought of the early morning. The speaker's dad is additionally acquainted which drives one with trust that he will figure midway in the lyric. The basic activity of the man getting up and dressing is honed as a picture by the utilization of the fascinating and striking descriptive word "blueblack," which depicts a murkiness that will soon be differentiated by the picture of flame. This starting may likewise be seen to recommend something of the father's character too, as he is up before sunrise, and is the one to go up against the chilly dimness of the home. Subsequent to building up the complex enthusiastic feeling of the recalled custom, the speaker offers a striking logical conversation starter that will end the ballad. Line 13 gives, with a practically arguing redundancy, the affirmation of lack of awareness with respect to the speaker. At that point Line 14 uncovers what it is that the speaker was uninformed about, what he has found thinking back on those mornings. It is the way of affection, all the more particularly the adoration for the father. The principal key descriptive word to offer knowledge into this is "severe." This implies basic, or unadorned, additionally expelled from the thoughts of joy. Every one of this we find in the depiction of the father who dismisses his own particular solace and goes up against the cool and agony of his hands, with a specific end goal to cultivate the solace of his family. The second modifier, "desolate," then adds to this the component of detachment, which the father encountered every morning as he assembled the
Those Winter Sundays Everyone has done something in their lifetime that they later regret. A great example of that in poetry is “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden which really states so much in just three short stanzas. In this poem the speaker talks about how his father used to work so hard during the week and kept them warm with fires on Sundays. No one ever showed the father any respect and never did they thank him for doing this. The speaker is reflecting on his past and even feels bad at about not showing appreciation back when his father did these nice things.
In the poem Those Winters Sundays, by Robert Hayden, we find a son talking about a moment in his childhood that involves his father, and how his father did so much for him as a child that he never asked for. We can tell that the son is at the end of his life, and is reminiscing about the past. The reason one could believe, this is because he calls his home, “that house”. This shows that he is thinking of the past. In addition, in the last stanza he states, “ what did I know”. This shows that he did not appreciate the things his father did for him as a young child. This is another proof that the son is looking back and thinking about his relationship with his father.
In Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” the speaker is a man who is maturing in his perception of love. He is realizing that love can be shown in many strange ways, and that though he never seemed to show it, his father truly did love him. Every morning, his father would wake up in the cold, early morning, to bank the fire and heat the house, and he would not wake the rest of the house until the rooms were warm. The main character had a fear of his father because of his temper, however he did not understand that his father was not always angry with him, he was just tired. His father worked hard every day and never got much recognition. Now that the main character has matured, he can look back and see that everything his father did for the