Those Winter Sundays By Robert Hayden

In the poem, “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, the author uses subtle symbolism to reflect the speaker’s distant relationship with his father. The title of the poem immediately tells the reader that the poem takes place in winter, a time that connotes both coldness and gloominess. Hayden starts his short, redolent poem by writing that the speaker’s father put his clothes on in the, “blue black cold” (Hayden line 2). The reader instantly feels the cold and iciness inside and outside the house.
The poem continues, “then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze” (3-5). Very quickly, the reader is knowledgeable that the father’s cracked hands tells the reader the hard work the father labors