Love can be expressed in many ways, even in the simple act of making a house warm in the morning

By Elizabeth Majerus
English executive teacher
Posted Thursday, April 20, 2006, features

[Note: In honor of National Poetry Month, The Online Gargoyle asked each of Uni's English teachers to pick a favorite poem. We were curious: What does this poem mean to you? Why does it move you? How does it move you? What's the history of your relationship with the poem? Suzanne Linder started us off with her selection on April 5, followed by Steve Rayburn on April 7 and Rosemary Laughlin on April 14. Today Elizabeth Majerus, head of the English department, discusses her choice — or, more accurately, one of her choices among many. Contact us here or here to tell us about your own favorite poem.]

I can't write about my favorite poem because — of course — I have more than one. But “Those Winter Sundays” by the African-American poet Robert Hayden (1913-1980) is a favorite poem of mine, one that I've loved since the first time I read it many years ago.

Like most of my favorites, this poem says a great deal in a very brief space. In part, it tells the story of a house ravaged by cold, and sharply conveys how awful it is to get out of a warm bed on a freezing cold morning. More importantly, it tells the story of the father who gets up and “drive[s] out” that cold, and the feelings that this simple, repeated act awake in his son not at the time, but in retrospect.

The poem moves me greatly, and more so because it expresses itself simply, without emotional flourishes. I like being emotionally transported, but only when I feel that I have not been manipulated. The father is not depicted as perfect, or even heroic. In fact, the poem gives us a glimpse of darkness and stress in this family, “the chronic angers” of the house. But in the daily act of getting up early in the bitter cold and stoking the furnace to spare the rest of his family from the chill, he conveys his love for them.

I find this poem compelling because it illustrates that love is complex and at times ineffable. It offers a view of love very different from what most people expect from poetry — it's not pretty, it's not effortless, and it's not even happy per se because it isn't recognized as love at the time this habitual gesture of love is being made. I suspect the father himself doesn't recognize his sacrifice as love. Yet the poem makes us see that it is love, and a very important kind of love, a moment of beauty and kindness — unrequested and unthanked — in a home that knows bitterness and anger.

I can't leave off talking about a poem I love without touching on its images, and the interplay between image and sound. So vivid, “the blueblack cold” which later “splinters, breaking” as the heat spreads through the house, the father's “cracked hands that ache / from labor in the weekday weather,” hands that “[make] / banked fires blaze.” Hayden paints a dreary setting and a difficult chore with images that are both striking and musical.

He also uses repetition to powerful effect. Repetition is always a risk, and in this poem it pays off. Because the rest of the poem is so spare and understated, the increased drama of the repeated ending “What did I know, what did I know / of love's austere and lonely offices?” rings true and hits hard.

It is difficult to paraphrase all the ideas and emotions at work in this simple ending — the speaker's epiphany about his father's love for him, his regret at the indifference with which he treated his father at the time, his realization of the “lonely” and “austere” elements of parental love and the duties it demands, the simultaneous distance and proximity the speaker feels to his young self.

“Those Winter Sundays” is much more than the sum of its parts, satisfying as those parts are, and that is what makes it an exceptional poem.

“Those Winter Sundays”

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?

Poem: “Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden, from “Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems,” 1975 (W.W. Norton & Co.)