Work

In his poem “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden presents the dignity and drudgery of the work it takes for a father to support his family. Work means to be engaged in a physical or mental activity in order to achieve a result, and this concept takes on two different meanings in the poem. The first is the reality of the father’s manual labor on weekdays in order to earn a financial living. The second is the way the father rises early even on Sundays to stoke a fire and polish the speaker’s shoes. Later in life, the speaker comes to see these efforts as a profound form of love. Overall, the father’s stoic labor to keep cold and hardship at bay reveal the ways in which sacrifices often go unseen within families.

The very first line indicates the father’s weekly toil. It...