Hayden invites the audience of this poem to share some private moments, who uses her response as an occasion for musing about what it feels like to be a real man, about the importance of “hometown,” about love for the past, and about the habit of joining organizations-all of this while sitting alone in a room of her home. The narrator of Those winter Sundays is a son who recollects his memories about the father and a generation gap that existed between the father and son.
The poem begins with a simple statement depicting the routine life of the low-class worker. “Sundays too my father got up early / And put his clothes on in the blueback cold” (Hayden). While the son contemplates the wording in her letter of acceptance, the audience is invited into her consciousness to experience her customary inductive, practical, and clear thought processes as he decides his life experience. The son does not realize that his father takes care of him and made banked fires blaze” (Hayden).
In order to depict a generation gap, Hayden creates a complex central character, and improved focus is only a portion of what he needed to master to become successful. The central character is a father who works all his life but earns too little: And put his clothes on in the blueback cold, then with cracked hands that ached” (Hayden). Hayden’s focus on the marginal man also resonates with autobiographical influences.
His sensitive portrayal of the working-class individual, as represented by Sam, could easily be a tribute to his mother; Hayden not only acknowledges the father as the model for his characters, strong and independent yet warm and maternal but also, thanks to his legacy, he came to understand the exclusionary tactics of class distinction and stereotype.
His defense of underprivileged, underrepresented, and frequently overlooked members of society shows up in the character of the son. “When the rooms were warm, he’d call, / and slowly I would rise and dress, / fearing the chronic anger of that house” (Hayden). Hayden revealed his compassion for working-class individuals living on the fringes of society: They do it [work in menial jobs] for some years, and never once do we think to say, “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (Hayden).
The repetition allows Hayden to unveil hardship and grievances faced by the family. Hayden uses repetition of “banked” and “thanked‘. As a staunch advocate of sustaining one’s cultural ties, Hayden is apprehensive about working men who cast culture. He argues that political and economic equality does not have to mean giving up one’s distinct attributes; Hayden hails differences as sources of pride rather than as evidence of inferiority.
He is well aware that poor people do things differently from whites and demonstrates in his poem in both subtle and more obvious ways a host of cultural distinctions. Hayden writes: “from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him” (Hayden). Even in the least conspicuous of the daily rituals, Hayden finds their signature: in the way they behave with the children, in the way they talk, in the way they worship, and so on. He constructs a world of poor, drawing from as many aspects of the culture as possible: customs and beliefs, work, language, food, clothing, and so on.
In the poem, the generation gap is unveiled through specific moods and conflicts between the father and son. It is possible to say that his imagination had been limited by his son’s own youthful inexperience and by the restraints imposed by poverty and abbreviated high school education. The poet transforms the father’s character into the common man’s bard who fashions protective armor out of his words to ward against symbolic emasculation. The poem establishes a premise with which presumably the audience agrees and then attempts to transmit the force of that agreement to a conclusion with which, presumably, the audience would not have agreed initially.
Thus it rationally insists on a conclusion from which the audience, for non-rational reasons, may demur. Balanced against the desire for the experience of new sight is our fear of it. Turning oneself inside out and seeing the world with new eyes is distinctly uncomfortable, and it can be dangerous. In both poems, the idea of ethics and moral dominance forcing readers to think and interpret unique life experiences and events depicted by the authors. It entails the presumption that logic should overrule the emotional and intuitive nature. The proms lay aside the critical poem’s assumption of logical superiority.
In sum, the theme of generation hap is dramatized by stylistic devices and language means which help the poet to unveil the feelings of the father and his son. The poem teaches readers that the problem of the generation gap is caused by the indifference and inability of children to understand and appreciate the efforts and care of their parents.
Works Cited
Hayden, Robert. Those winter Sundays. 2008. Web.