Of Love’s Dignity, Unspoken:
Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”

Attending a memorial service yesterday for a longtime friend of Mary’s gone too young, I beheld at the subsequent wake in a spacious social hall a looping video of still images from Peter’s life, scores of them showing endearing portraits of him paired sometimes individually with his son or daughter, other times with both of them, still others with his wife and children as a family unit.

All of the photos collectively, in the spirit of this cold gray December day dedicated to honoring one man’s life, exuding the sweep, the presence, the intrinsic and undeniable power, the wide magisterial sweep, of the father figure in human life.

Even in cases of a father’s (or mother’s) absence due to death, desertion, or same-sex marriage and adoption, the respective archetypes of father and mother loom as perennial structures in the human psyche, ripe and required for lifelong cultivation by the progeny they bring forth into the world.

It is not for nothing that therapy for just about every psychological purpose sooner rather than later includes a download and processing of one’s parental influences, seen most clearly (if ever!) in the rear-view mirror of one’s maturity and its attendant distance and perspective.

Nested, beaks agape awaiting our daily ration of food and the desperate force of love and generativity behind it, we live minute-to-minute in the blindness of birthright, our ignorance total, seeking only more of what has enabled our everything.

Therapy, of course, can come in many different forms. I don’t know enough about poet Robert Hayden’s detailed biography to know whether he ever entered therapy to untangle the uncommonly tangled knots of his own birth and early life (more on that below). But I do know that the act of writing poetry often serves as a poet’s prime form of therapy, a reckoning with elements of the past the poet can’t possibly have begun to approach when living through that past in younger days.

Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays,” published when he was 49 years old in his 1962 volume, “A Ballad of Remembrance,”  is one such poem.

In this now widely anthologized work of just 14 lines, Hayden takes us deeply into what we might call a reappraisal or long overdue appreciation of a distant, even feared father figure who is seen anew from one enduring image that lodged securely in the memory bank of his son and achieved crystalline expression many decades on.

Let’s read it below.

***

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?

(Copyright © 1966 by Robert Hayden, from “Collected Poems of Robert Hayden,” edited by Frederick Glaysher, Liveright Publishing Corporation)

***

The poem begins, “Sundays too…,” those three letters of “too” doing an inordinate amount of work to denote this father taking no extra rest on the sabbath from his self-appointed task of warming the family home (inner city Detroit) in the “blueback cold” of a December morning. We see him “with cracked hands that ached/from labor in the weekday weather,” and decades on, the devastating regret of the poet remembering and wincing in one deceptive, anything-but-simple line, “No one ever thanked him.” 

One of Hayden’s favorite poetic techniques is to repeat lines, achieving an incantatory power in cementing an image or thought in the reader’s consciousness. He uses the technique in the final stanza (“What did I know, what did I know?”), but I feel compelled to do it for him in the first stanza as well: “No one ever thanked him.”

What can we possibly know of gratitude as children? Nested, beaks agape awaiting our daily ration of food and the desperate force of love and generativity behind it, we live minute-to-minute in the blindness of birthright, our ignorance total, seeking only more of what has enabled our everything.

It is only in adulthood, given a big boost by our own parenthood if we choose it, that we can look back and realize the all-encompassing work, the total immersion, of parenting, its demands including the reality that children will live largely in ignorance of its implicit, everyday sacrifices for a good many years to come, and perhaps forever.

***

***

Severely near-sighted and left to wear thick glasses from early childhood on, Hayden developed an acute sense and appreciation for hearing the very sounds of life and the words used to describe it. Thus we hear with him “the cold splintering,” that “splintering” doing double duty as both a splintering of the wood his father is feeding into the fire and its rivening of the cold, breaking through it with the onrushing warmth of the flames.

Then, as the warming house signals the father to call out, the son rises, but this will be no groggy head-long tumble into warmly beckoning arms. Instead, we feel an almost zombie-like trudge as the poet closes with another power-punch in the second stanza’s final line: “fearing the chronic angers of that house.”

The line remains unelaborated in the poem’s final four lines, as the poet’s voice switches again to one of (belated) appreciation. That suggests that the “chronic angers” were perhaps not of an acute and abusive nature, but of a simmering unspokenness, an austerity the poet references in the final line.

And yet: not only had his father driven out the cold on this and every other day of the family’s life, but he had polished his son’s shoes in the (also unspoken) bargain. Leading the son-turned-poet to ask, arms figuratively outstretched in plaintive self-reproach, “What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (What could he have known?)

What does any child ever know of such things? Especially when so much longed-for love is cloaked in restraint, blanketed by “chronic angers,” the child confused, short-changed, left only to “speak indifferently” to one who had shown, if not spoken, so much devotion and care.

Although some sources suggest both argumentative and physical altercations between his parents and their occasional abuse of him, in an archival 1975 interview (see below), Hayden expresses the same appreciation of his father in particular (“a hard-working man, a Baptist”) as he does in the poem. He lauds his instrumental role in fostering his son’s education. “I owe him a great deal. He really cared about me getting an education,” he tells the interviewer. “He said, ‘Get something in your head and you won’t have to live like this.'”

Elsewhere, we see, however, particularly in his poem, “The Whipping,” strong biographical indications that his mother beat him on occasion. Even here, the poem ends with a note of understanding and compassion for the demons that drove her:

And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged—
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.

***

Robert Earl Hayden came into the world on August 4, 1913 as Ada Bundy Sheffey, to unmarried parents who had separated before his birth. At 18 months, he was placed in foster care with next-door neighbors, who raised him with his later understanding that he had been adopted and rechristened with his father’s family name, which he kept for the rest of his life.

At age 40, well-established as an assistant professor at Nashville’s historically black Fisk University, long married to a music teacher and with a 9-year-old daughter, he discovered no adoption had ever occurred and no birth certificate had ever been known to exist for him. Despite the profound sense of dislocation that now drew him back to the tumult of his childhood, Hayden leaned even more deeply into his poetry and the universalist Bahá’í faith that his wife had embraced and then attracted him to early in their marriage, as he pursued his graduate degree at the University of Michigan.

Yet more dislocation was to dog him through the roiling currents of the Black Power movement in the 1960s. Hayden had written extensively of the black experience throughout his career, but resisted the label of being a “black poet,” feeling as a matter of religious and literary conviction that he wrote for universal, non-sectarian themes that aimed for a transformed civilization based on brotherly-sisterly love.

He was pilloried for this by more fiery young black activists of the time. It was no small irony that he had written poems on Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass, was solicited by the great black poet Langston Hughes to personally inscribe his 1966 volume, “Selected Poems,” and his other most widely anthologized poem, “Middle Passage,” stands as a haunting, almost hallucinatory treatment of the famous “Amistad Slave Revolt.”

That 1839 event involved west African slaves en route to Cuba, where they were to be sold off at sugar plantations along the way. Instead they rose up in rebellion against their Spanish overlords and took control of the ship, the situation resolved only by a strange historical twist that saw the case come up before the United States Supreme Court and resolved in the slaves’ favor.

Despite the pain the Black Power imbroglio caused Hayden, his poetic star continued to rise through the remainder of his life.

After 23 years at Fisk, he was lured back to the University of Michigan as a professor from 1969 until his death from cancer at age 66 in 1980. Sandwiched within those years were poet-in-residence appointments at multiple universities and the prestigious post of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1976-77, a position renamed since then as the Poet Laureate of the United States.