Those Winter Sundays

In this poem, the narrator is talking about how every Sunday morning him and his father would wake up in the freezing cold weather and do work outside. This poem is very descriptive and really creates a picture in the readers mind. For example, when the narrator says, "Then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather," the reader is able to get a distinct picture of what this looks like in their mind. From this sentence, we can infer that the boy's father does manual labor outside during the winter. This manual labor is not only broodle for him, but very painful as well. Throughout the poem, Robert E. Hayden also uses many metaphors. He talks about the father putting on his clothes in the "blueblack cold," and how when the son wakes up he hears the "cold splintering and breaking." Robert E. Hayden is also very honest in this poem, as the reader can really understand and get a sense of what the narrator is feeling on these cold winter sunday mornings.