Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Those Winter Sundays Analysis

A vital clue to the unsettling emotional content of "Those Winter Sundays" is contained in its first line. The poet's use of the word too is a jarring choice because it is the opening statement, and too is an adverb more usually employed in the middle or last part of a statement, clarifying and explaining the first part (as in, He went outside, and I went too.). In this text, however, the assertive usage of that word becomes a device for calling attention to itself and by extension to the critical nature of the text. The meaning of too is ambiguous: Does it suggest that the father's getting up was a special activity performed on the weekend as if it were just another workday, or does too suggest that the poet had something of an attitude about a parental routine that disturbed the poet's weekend sleep? In other words, does the poet remember the father's behavior fondly or in a surly way?

The disagreeable portion of the poet's memory is of the physical environment of his childhood, evidently in a house that had no modern conveniences. Undoubtedly the father had little social standing, for he is a man who labors with his hands, not his head, "in the weekday weather," and who has the aching, cracked hands to prove it (3-4). If that does not describe hardscrabble poverty, it describes something very close. And on Sundays (too), the labor continues, as the father chops wood to heat the houses and breaks ice to melt enough for washing and cooking--an image conveyed by "cold splintering and breaking" (6). Only when the house warms up a bit did he wake up the rest of the house.

What the rest of the house remains ambiguous. The statement that "No one ever thanked him," which in the sense that it conveys an uncomfortable, unsettling memory pays off the usage of too in the first line, suggests that there were several people in the household who were unappreciative of how hard he worked. The second stanza closes with the po...

Page 1 of 4 Next >

More on Those Winter Sundays Analysis...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Those Winter Sundays Analysis. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 18:38, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2000557.html