The meaninglessness of life is often mitigated by the personal meaning we attach to memories of moments, good or bad, shared and experienced with loved ones. In Robert HaydenÆs ôThose Winter Sundaysö and Sharon OldsÆ ôRites of Passage,ö we see the speakersÆ are both mature. In Sundays, the speaker is remembering an experience of childhood shared with his father, one that is embedded with much more meaning to him now that he is mature than it was for him as a child. In Rites, the speaker is a mature mother who is watching her child and his friends at a birthday party. Knowing what she knows of life and men, she imagines their interaction with horrifying imagery. In both poems, the poets provide us with a rather distinct and polar point of view of human existence.
In both Sundays and Rites, the speakers are remembering or experiencing a moment with loved ones, in the former a son with his father during a daily ritual and in the latter a mother presiding over her sonÆs birthday party. The setting, content, and imagery of Sundays are ones that is imagined by the speaker, based on his memories of the event. The depiction is in the past tense, ôIÆd wake and hear the cold splintering, breakingö (Hayden 1). The setting, content, and imagery of Rites are occurring for the speaker in the here-and-now, ôAs the guests arrive at my sonÆs partyö (Olds 1).
In Sundays, the speaker remembers the sacrifices his father made for him on cold winter days. His father rose early in the ôblueblack coldö to make a fire to warm the house, even though no one ôever thanked him,ö for it, (Hayden 1). The fatherÆs hands are cracked and ache from the cold and the bitter labor he endures to provide for his family. Despite his tireless devotion to providing for his family, the speaker in the poem remembers he would often ôspeak indifferentlyö to his father (Hayden 1). The speaker ends up lamenting that he had so
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