Poetry for All

Transcript of Episode 24: Robert Hayden ÒThose Winter SundaysÓ

[intro music]

Joanne:

Hello, IÕm Joanne Diaz.

Abram:

And IÕm Abram Van Engen.

Joanne:

And this is _Poetry For All_.

Abram:

In this podcast, we read a poem, discuss it, learn from it, and then read it one more time.

Joanne:

Today, we will be discussing what is probably one of the most famous of all-American poems, Robert HaydenÕs ÒThose Winter Sundays.Ó Robert Hayden was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. He was born as Asa Bundy Sheffey in the paradise neighborhood of Detroit in 1913, and he had a strict and difficult upbringing with adoptive parents. He went on to study poetry with the great W.H. Auden and then as a teaching fellow, became the first black faculty member at the University of Michigan in their English department. In 1976, he was the first African American to serve as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the post that we now call the U.S. Poet Laureate. So thatÕs just a little bit of information about him. Abram, would you like to start us off by reading this poem for us?

Abram:

Absolutely. ÒThose Winter SundaysÓ by Robert Hayden: [please see https://poets.org/poem/those-winter-sundays for the poem]

Joanne:

That was a beautiful reading. I love that poem.

Abram:

That is an amazing poem.

Joanne:

Yes!

Abram:

[laughs] I love this poem.

Joanne:

[laughs] ThatÕs the end of the episode!

Abram:

[laughing] ThatÕs it! WeÕre done!

Joanne:

[laughing]

Abram:

[laughing] Should we read it again now? ThatÕs great.

Joanne:

I know! I know! The poem, itÕs really incredible!

Abram:

I know! Maybe to get into this poem, we should begin at the beginning and work through the lines and think about how itÕs working. So, what do you see in that first line?

	Sundays too my father got up early

Joanne:

Well, weÕve talked in this podcast a number of times about the many choices available to any poet when theyÕre writing a line of poetry. And so, when I read that first line:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

The word that IÕm immediately drawn to is such a simple word: Òtoo.Ó Now, Robert Hayden could have written something far less poetic, like ÒSundays my father got up early alsoÓ or ÒIn addition to every other day of the week, my father got up on Sundays.Ó

Abram:

[laughs]

Joanne:

But he says ÒSundays too.Ó And that emphasizes for me that on the one day that this father could have gotten a break--right? On a day of rest--HeÕs still laboring. And I think that that labor is at the front of this poem in a very powerful way precisely because of that word Òtoo.Ó

Abram:

The placement of words has so much power to create the emphasis for words. If that ÒtooÓ even came at the end of the line, it wouldnÕt have the same force it has, so ÒSundays my father got up early too.Ó But what stands out to me in that opening line is this sense of Òmy father.Ó ThereÕs a formality there, thereÕs a distance already there, created between this person whoÕs remembering his childhood and his father in that childhood. And so, itÕs not as surprising when we come to Òthe chronic angers of the house,Ó right? ItÕs not a Òdaddy,Ó itÕs notÊ Òpapa,Ó itÕs ÒSundays too my father got up early.Ó

Joanne:

Yeah, that formality is very important because, of course, you may not immediately see it the first few times you read the poem, but of course, it is like a modified sonnet and those first few lines of the poem announce that even if it isnÕt perfect iambic pentameter. There are rhythms and cadences that Robert Hayden is setting up to alert the reader to the fact that it has that sonnet logic that weÕve talked about many times in this podcast, right?:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

ThereÕs a way in which that very deliberate meter; yes, thereÕs variation but thereÕs that walking beat that the greatest of sonnets has, that prepares you for that kind of formal, dignified movement in each of the lines.

Abram:

And just so listeners know, who donÕt have the poem in front of them, this is fourteen lines--which is a classic, for a sonnet--and so one of the questions is does this have all the classic features of a sonnet? It doesnÕt have the same sort of end rhyme scheme as say, a Shakespearean sonnet or Petrarchan sonnet. One of the questions is, what is rhyme doing in this poem? But then in terms of thinking about it as a sonnet, where is the turn? Is there a turn in this poem and what is that turn?

Joanne:

The shape is actually fairly simple. The first twelve lines of the poem allow the poetic speaker to reminisce about what would happen, habitually, on Sundays. So the majority of the poem, all itÕs doing is remembering those habitual activities and then the final two lines, this is why itÕs a sonnet. Regardless of anything else you want to say:

	What did I know, what did I know
	of loveÕs austere and lonely offices?

The meter is fantastic, the pattern of repetition where the thirteenth line asks twice, Òwhat did I know?Ó ItÕs ending with a rhetorical question that is very, very difficult to answer. So basically, if you imagine Robert HaydenÕs speaker in a posture of remembrance for twelve lines and then in the final two lines, a posture of almost directly speaking to the audience, and saying: ÒWhat did I know? I knew nothing! I had no idea until this moment of utterance of the depth and breadth of sacrifice that this man was making for me!Ó

Abram:

Mhm.

Joanne:

And so that dramatic turn--called the volta--that dramatic shift you can feel and see it in the poem, and I feel like thatÕs what makes it a sonnet. The poem by the time you get to that final question, does feel like a poem of gratitude. It might be belated gratitude, it may be a gratitude that the father never gets to hear or read, but itÕs put out into the universe in a very powerful way.

Abram:

And the one other thread that just structurally holds this poem together is to think about how the one word ÒcoldÓ is the only word repeated in each of the three stanzas. So in the beginning, in the first stanzas, weÕre in the blueblack cold, in the second we hear the cold splintering, and in the third, the father has driven out the cold. And so thereÕs actually a narrative element to whatÕs happening to that coldness throughout this poem and itÕs the only word thatÕs repeated from stanza to stanza.

Joanne:

The interesting thing about the repetition though is that the father might have been able to successfully drive out the climate related cold, but he wasnÕt successful at driving out the coldness in the relationships, right?

Abram:

Yes.

Joanne:

I mean, part of the reason that this is such a belated utterance of gratitude is because there are chronic angers in that house. ThatÕs one of the most famous waysÉ--Jesus, Òchronic angers.Ó I remember reading that decades ago and going thinking, Òwow. That is...I know exactly what that is. That is so powerful and so familiar to familial relationshipsÓ you know? ItÕs so hard for us [laughs] to just love each other and communicate properly with each other. And the chronic angers. What a memorable phrase. And that was something that clearly the father was not able to drive out. And that failure is at the heart of the poem. The complexity of familial relationships that heÕs able to depict in such a short space is just devastating.

Abram:

And you know, what strikes me too about the poem is that the person who is saying this, the occasion of this poem, you donÕt get to the sense that this narrator is with somebody else, that thereÕs anyone else in the room. And so there feels like thereÕs a kind of coldness and an isolation, that thereÕs a kind of...that the cycle has repeated itself. And I say that partly because that ÒtooÓ in the first line almost feels sometimes like he is identifying with this father. ItÕs almost as though heÕs sitting there, polishing shoes by himself on a Sunday morning, thinking back to his father doing the same thing and realizing that this was his attempted bridge, this was his attempt to show his love in a house that only knew very little expressions of love.

Joanne:

Whoa, okay, thatÕs really helpful because that helps me think about what spurred the poetic speaker into utterance, what is the dramatic situation the speaker might find himself in and it seems that he could not have this realization about ÒloveÕs austere and lonely officesÓ unless he himself saw and inhabited those offices. So, I actually, the first time I read it, I remember that I read this poem for a long time, thinking that those were like offices like in an executive building.

Abram:

Yes!

Joanne:

And it actually works that way pretty well because if you walk into an austere and lonely office, and try to imagine filling that with love or imagining that as a metaphor for what love can feel like when people donÕt realize your sacrifices, that actually works really well. But thereÕs another meaning, right Abram?

Abram:

That last word kills me because we talk about holy offices and we talk about the priest as having a holy office and so on and the way that this father is polishing these shoes, itÕs almost as if though theyÕre a kind of relic or a ritual, that this is the way of showing love. ItÕs sort of like the way you might prepare communion. This father polishes shoes on Sunday morning. The other thing about this poem is that this priest has created the problem that this priest is trying to solve. Right? The chronic angers in the house are not coming from nowhere. The father has caused the problem that the father is trying to bridge through these act of love that are lonely and austere. And so it has that feeling of almost making holy what is extraordinarily ordinary. The polishing of shoes, the making of a fire on early Sunday morning.

Joanne:

Yeah. I mean, itÕs a poem of reconciliation as well as gratitude then because this poetic speaker is acknowledging that we donÕt always get the love that we want. So this father in the way that youÕre describing these holy offices, thatÕs the love that heÕs capable of giving. Even if itÕs not the one that his child needed. And for the poet in his maturity and wisdom to be able to recognize that, and ask that question at the end is very, very powerful.

Abram:

So Joanne, weÕve talked about the structure of this poem, how itÕs like a sonnet with the big turn at the end, how itÕs got the surprises in it, but we havenÕt yet talked about the incredible sounds of this poem. Can you carry us into that? What do you notice about the sounds and how theyÕre working in this poem?

Joanne:

Yeah, I think this is where Robert Hayden is a brilliant formalist. And I should say this, just as a little side note, this is our first Robert Hayden poem but it will not be the last [laughs] because I love so much of his work and admire him a great deal and a lot of why I admire him is because of his deep and broad engagement with the African American experience. If you read this poem in an anthology--which so many people do--this poem has a kind of transcendence and universality that feels very accessible to any reader. ItÕs a brilliant, brilliant poem. But this is a poet who wrote poems about Fredrick Douglas and Nat Turner and Malcom X and the Middle Passage and he is a poet who is capable of great epic poetry, narrative poetry, other kinds of forms beyond the sonnet. I just canÕt say enough about him and the more I learn about him, the more I want to know. HeÕs so great. So we will visit those other facets of his greatness in other episodes, but the throughline for all of that poetry is his mastery of sound. ItÕs just incredible. So look at what he does. He sort of allows sound--especially assonance within the line--to sort of toss the baton. ItÕs sort of like a relay race, where each time thereÕs assonance, it shifts slightly. Especially in stanzas one and two.

Abram:

And just so weÕre clear for any listener who might not know, can you define assonance for us?

Joanne:

ThatÕs when we see vowels within the line resonating with each other. So maybe I could just give a couple of examples. We have at the very beginning of the poem:

	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.

So listen to what heÕs doing there. He starts with ÒblackÓ and Òcracked.Ó So thatÕs the short ÒaÓ sound, the Òaah,Ó right? And then it shifts from ÒcrackedÓ to Òached,Ó right? From Ò_cracked_ hands that _ached_ / from _labor_ in the weekday weather _made_ / _banked_ fires blaze.Ó So then it becomes a more opened ÒaÓ sound and that allows the ache to go with the labor and the labor to remind us of whatÕs been made. And then Òbanked fires blazeÓ and then that banking is picked up in the thanking; Òmade / _banked_ fires blaze. No one ever _thanked_ him.Ó so the banking thatÕs aligned with labor is also aligned with the thanking that never happens. So thatÕs just in the first stanza, a way in which he creates these clusters of sound that directly contribute to the content of the poem.

Abram:

It makes sense to be talking about ÒachedÓ and ÒwakedÓ and ÒbreakingÓ as a way of splintering the cold. ThereÕs this cracking open, this hard sound thatÕs tying together those first six lines.

Joanne:

Yes.

Abram:

And then the rooms were warm. I mean, thereÕs an old linguistic experiment where they have people talk about...they give them two shapes--a circle and a star, I believe it is--and they say, Òwhich one is booboo and which one is kiki?Ó and ahÉ

Joanne:

[laughing]

Abram:

And I mean, ÒboobooÓ and ÒkikiÓ donÕt mean anything but almost universally, people put ÒboobooÓ with the circle and ÒkikiÓ with the star.

Joanne:

Wait! Wait!

Abram:

Because these sounds fit those shapes. And notice what happens, as soon as the cold has splintered, what are the sounds that we get next? ÒRoomÓ and ÒwarmÓ and Òslowly.Ó We get _warm_ sounds.

Joanne:

Ah, can we go back to ÒboobooÓ and ÒkikiÓ for a second? [laughing]

Abram:

[laughs]

Joanne:

[laughing] What are you talking about? IÕve _never_ heard of this before! You make it sound like weÕre just walking the street, walking our dog and youÕre telling me this anecdote and IÕm like, Òyeah sureÓ and everybody knows. What?!

Abram:

[laughing] Yeah, yeah thatÕs a thing.

Joanne:

What does it _mean_? What does that _mean_?

Abram:

I will look it up, but the sense in which we associate certain shapes with certain sounds, that sounds do have a certain quality to them, and that itÕs not a coincidence or an accident when we talk about poets using ÒhardÓ sounds like ÒachedÓ and ÒwakedÓ and Òbreaking,Ó and when we say that theyÕre hard sounds, that makes a certain kind of sense. And when we say that words like ÒroomÓ and ÒwarmÓ are soft sounds, that makes a certain kind of sense to people. And thereÕs actually some kinds of experiments about this that suggest that thatÕs not just us throwing interpretations onto a poem, that there is something in that that makes sense to people.

Joanne:

Wow.

Abram:

But the other thing that he does with these sounds is that he speeds us up and slows us down in really interesting ways. So in those first five lines, Òmade / banked fires blaze,Ó you canÕt make that fast. Each word requires emphasis. Each word requires slowing down to look at and dwell on the labor of this father in the cold to make this fire blaze. But _then_ look how fast and short is the sentence that follows, ÒNo one ever thanked him.Ó

Joanne:

Yeah.

Abram:

So itÕs not just that he is showing the indifference, itÕs that in the way that he spells out and expresses the indifference, we can almost pass over it without noticing it.

Joanne:

Which is important to the point heÕs trying to make about love and gratitude. And then elsewhere, he slows us down. In stanza two, he says Òand slowly I would rise and dress, / fearing the chronic angers of that house.Ó So ÒdressÓ and ÒhouseÓ are very nice, but ÒslowlyÓ is the word that really interests me there. And then later in the third stanza, Òwhat did I know? What did I know,Ó that big open ÒohÓ and how itÕs aligned between ÒslowlyÓ and Òknow?Ó It took him a long time to know this. And the slowness of that realization is embedded in the language, right?

Abram:

ThereÕs so many ways through sound and structure and rhythm that he is moving us through this poem and creating narratives within narratives.

Joanne:

Yeah and itÕs such a complex poem for precisely that reason. This is a father who is offering love through these actions. Unfortunately the son was looking for a different kind of love, but this was the love that the father had to offer. And so looking back now, the poetic speaker can recognize that, but for so long he couldnÕt and thatÕs, of course, whatÕs so painful about the poem.

Abram:

Mhm. Would you be willing to read this poem again?

Joanne:

Yes. IÕd be glad to. ÒThose Winter SundaysÓ:

      Sunday 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.

	IÕd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
	When the rooms were warm, heÕd 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 loveÕs austere and lonely offices?

Abram:

Mm, so good. Thank you. We will have more Robert Hayden later, for sure.

Joanne:

[laughs]

[outro music starts]

Abram:

For sure. We want to show some incredible range of this incredible poet. But in the meantime, we hope youÕll remember to subscribe to the _Poetry For All_ podcast via Apple Podcast, iTunes, Spotify, or any other provider. Please leave us a review and let us know how weÕre doing. You can always follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Joanne:

Thank you for listening.

[outro music continues to end]