Those Winter Sundays (Robert Hayden)

I've known this poem by Robert Hayden for years. I forget where I first ran across it. I find great comfort in it. It shows up, for me, every few years in new ways and with new perspectives. This poem is a constant, one that remains always full of compassion and truth no matter how or when you look at it.

I like how slowly this poem moves. How, when reading it, you are forced into a slow, even pace until the fantastic quickened concluding two lines. It is, wonderfully, reflective of the passage of years through which N gathers his understanding.

In Burt's class in college I had the task to take this poem and mark where the voice changes. I marked two lines as separate. The lines "No one ever thanked him" and "What did I know, what did I know/of love's austere and lonely offices?" differ from the rest of the poem in tone and in age. The whole poem is written many years past childhood, but while N is channeling childhood for the majority of the poem, for those two lines N speaks with an adult's voice--with a voice that can and has looked back and seen how he had misinterpreted his father's actions and intentions and feels the worse for having been so distant in youth.

Favorite line: "What did I know, what did I know/ of love's austere and lonely offices?"