Poetry: Those Winter Sundays, by Robert Hayden

Robert Hayden's Those Winter Sundays stops me in my tracks very time I read it, and hearing Hayden himself recite the poem gives me chills. I often hear the last refrain echoing throughout the Midwestern winter.

I highly recommend listening to a short recording of Hayden reading Those Winter Sundays here, from the Library of Congress, through PBS' ArtBeat.

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert E. Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Copyright ©1966 by Robert Hayden. Reprinted with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Source: Collected Poems of Robert Hayden (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1985. Found via the Poetry Foundation.