Those Winter Sundays Essay Example

When you first read the poem "Those Winter Sundays" you will quickly find out who the speaker is and what their relation is to the father in the poem. Line 1 says "Sundays too my father got up early" which indicates that the speaker is the child of the father in this work of literature. Robert Hayden uses several different poetic techniques to make his point and have the reader really think about what they are reading. In "Those Winter Sundays" there are several different alliterations Hayden uses in this poem. First we need to know that alliteration is the commencement of two or more stressed syllables of a word group. In "Those winter Sundays" there are a few alliterations being used. In line 2, Hayden uses "Blueblack cold" for the time or day and the weather. The father gets up every morning before the sun rises which explains "blueblack" and it describes cold because it's winter. Also, in line 4 he says "Weekday weather" as another way to show how the father worked all week long and not just Sundays. In line 5 "Banked fires blaze" is used to give a clue to what his father did on Sundays. After working all week he still got up on Sundays to gather wood for fire – a pile of wood a blaze.

Personification is used by a lot of authors to make the reader understand and feel like they are in the story and can relate to the characters they are reading about. The term “personification” puts to life a word by giving that word personal/humanistic qualities. In line 6, the speaker uses personification when referencing the sounds he heard while awakening- "I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking." Another example of personification in the poem is shown in line 9 where the speaker gives emotion to the house- "fearing the chronic angers of that house", we all know that a house is an inanimate object, but the speaker mentions it being mad. Using personification also helps the speaker emphasize how old and beat up the house is. The most interesting personifying in