Those Winter Sundays Essay, Research Paper

In the peom “Those Winter Sundays,” the author Robert Hayden uses folk motif drawn from his own experiences, but seeks inspiration from other sources as well.

Robert hayden was born to a struggling couple, Ruth and Asia Sheffey. They were divorced and Hayden moved in with a foster family. Sue Ellen Westerfield and William Hayden, adn grew up in a Detroit ghetto called “Paradise Valley.” he had a traumatic childhood, witnessing fights and suffering beatings. Since he was nearsighted and slight of stature, he was picked at by his peer group, adn becasue of his traumas he read a lot, and found a love for literature. He attended Detroit City College, which is now Wayne State University, left in 1936 to work for the Federal Writer’s Project, where he researched black history and folk culture.

The speaker could be a man or a boy. The speaker is a man because, his relationship with his father was not well at that time, when he was a teenager or boy. There is always “the chronic anger of that house,” and the reason why there was a tension atmosphere around that house may be due to poor relationship between his parents (just like I said when I was talking about the author). Theirs one thing that I suggested was that the speaker of his poem wrote this poem because now he also becomes a father. So he can understand how his father loves him and how the feeling of “no one thanked him.” It is just like an old Chinese saying “One never thanks his own parents until he began to raise his children.”

The speaker of this poem could have been a boy. He has started to know what his father did to him and feels his father’s love. in our tradition, we show our love in a conservative way. However, children in our society often take these things for granted. The father in the poem worked hard, but no one thanked him. The father was really kind, because he woke the boy up when he warmed teh house. He went out of the way t polish shoes for his child. Just because not knowing how to show our love, the father always appears in a serious way. That’s why the boy fears the chronic andgers of that house and speaks indifferently to his father. Those caused love’s austere and lonely offices.