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 "c

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