English

Those Winter Sunday

BY

ROBERT HAYDEN

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?

In the last two lines of the poem, the poet tells us how he feels about his relationship with his father. How does the poet structure this poem so that the last two lines accomplish this?

The poet structures his poem so that the last two lines explain how he feels about his relationship with his father. He realizes that, when he was young, he didn’t understand how much his father loved him, and he regrets this.