Explication of "Those Winter Sundays"

       This chapter in "Sound & Sense" talks about the many different varieties of imagery that can appear in poetry. The poem "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden makes great use of many of the different imagery types presented in this chapter. The poem is about a father who works extremely hard in order to provide for and comfort his family and even on sundays, his day off, he gets up to make his family warm on cold winter days. The speaker of the poem seems to be either his son or daughter. The speaker realizes how much his/her father does for the family and how his actions go unappreciated most of the time. The speaker gives readers a picture of his hard working, fatigued, exhausted father through his uses of visual, tactile and organic imagery.
       Although the author puts many types of imagery to use in the poem, the type that is central to the poem is visual imagery. When the speaker describes his father it is in such detail that the reader is able to imagine his pain: "With cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather made". This quote provides visual imagery of a father's hard work that has resulted in an aching body. In this quote the author is also using organic imagery to show the father's fatigue. Also in the quote "had driven out the cold" visual imagery is at work. This leads the reader to imagine the father physically pushing the cold out of his house, all for his family.
       The author also uses Tactile imagery to describe how the fathers changes the house from cold to warm: "I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. / When the rooms were warm he'd call" This shows how the father would sacrifice his warmth to provide it for the rest of the family. The reader is able to feel the house changing from cold to warm through the father's doing. Also when the author says "the blueblack cold" the reader is able to imagine how cold it truly is outside on this winter sunday morning, and it helps to show the strength of the father and the sacrifices he makes for his family.