Those Winter Sundays

When I first read this poem, I knew the author was a guy but for some reason I visualized the narrator as a young girl.  But as I read it again I realized it was a boy talking about his father and the day to day schedule his father has to deal with even though he is doing it achingly. I find it sad that when the boy says “fearing the chronic angers of that house” I think how on Sundays, the house seems empty without his father and it seems especially cold since it’s in the middle of winter. The descriptions in the poem describing his father are so vivid such as: “My father got up early and put his clothes in the blue black cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze” (1450).  It makes me wonder if this is about Robert Hayden recalling memories of his father and what he did to put food on the table, and how he feels a lot of respect towards the man even though “No one ever thanked him.” The descriptions also are the reason why I implied the narrator as a woman.

But I also feel like the boy is angry towards his father because this is all he has done with his life and sort of wishes he had done something more: “What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?” The descriptions almost imply to be that the father is young and had children at a young age and didn’t leave much for himself, and what he really wanted to do in life.