Those Winter Sundays

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1962

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Alliteration/Assonance

Though “Those Winter Sundays” does not follow a set rhythm or use a rhyme scheme, it does use other poetic conventions to create rhythm and strong sounds. The most prominent of these devices are alliteration (the repeated use of consonant sounds) and assonance (the repeated use of vowel sounds).

Critics usually note the poem’s alliteration as one of its strongest elements because Hayden uses repeating sounds to amplify the mood of the poem. He continually repeats the strong c and k sounds to create a harsh, cold feeling. The first stanza exemplifies this with the words clothes, black, cold, cracked, ached, week, banked, and thanked. He continues this in stanza two with wake, cold, breaking, call, and chronic. And in the final stanza, he again repeats the sounds with words like speaking and cold, though as the poem moves into its moment of reflection and regret, Hayden drops the harsh sounds of childhood.

Other repeated sounds are l, o, and a. The first stanza uses most of these sounds, including “clothes/cold” (Line 2), “labor/weekday/made” (Line 4), and “banked/thanked” (Line 5).

While these are all examples of alliteration and assonance, they are also examples of repetition, assonance, and consonance. All these poetic devices work together to create a rhythmic effect.

Rhythm

Though a traditional sonnet uses iambic pentameter, “Those Winter Sundays” has a variety of rhythms. Most of the lines contain 10 syllables, but some of the shorter lines break this rhythm. Nevertheless, most of the 10-syllable lines use set rhythms, whether it’s iambic pentameter or trochaic pentameter. Sometimes, too, the lines will use an iambic or trochaic rhythm in spurts, only to break the rhythm halfway through. Below are a few examples:

Trochaic pentameter: Sundays too my father got up early (Line 1)

Iambic pentameter: and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold (Line 2)

Half iambic: I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking (Line 6)

In the last example, notice how the rhythm breaks with the word “splintering.” The sound of the cold splintering and breaking splinters and breaks the rhythm. This seems an intentional choice.

Elegy

An elegy is a poem written in lament and expressing some kind of loss. While the elegy is usually written for someone who has died, “Those Winter Sundays” doesn’t specify whether the father is alive or dead. However, because the poem comes from a place of reflection and distance, the reader can assume the father has died or the speaker is looking back with nostalgia and regret at the memory of his father, which together creates a feeling of loss or grief similar to what one experiences when encountering a death.

The wonderful thing about poetic form is that definitions and examples are often messy and rarely strict. This poem is an elegy even though it doesn’t neatly fit the definition of an elegy. It’s also a sonnet even though it doesn’t neatly fit the traditional definition of a sonnet. Regardless, because the speaker writes with a first-person perspective, is meditative, reflective, and laments a kind of loss, it is appropriate to classify it as an elegy.