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Video: Joe Biden and Elizabeth Alexander discuss “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
President Joe Biden, poet Elizabeth Alexander, psychologist Angela Duckworth, and a chorus of working fathers and sons join Poetry in America host Elisa New to reflect on Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays.”
This conversation was first aired on January 11, 2021 on Poetry in America on GBH in Boston.
Running time: 27 minutes
Email subscribers may click on the title of this post to watch the video.
Those Winter Sundays
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?
Vox Populi 
Just one of my favourite poems and a reminder of my childhood where it wasn’t my father, but my mother.
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Me too, Rose Mary!
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the blueback cold also refers to the bluing placed on rifles to keep them from rusting
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Wow! I taught that poem for years, and I’ve read or recited it a thousand times, and I grew up in the rural gun culture of the South, and yet the connection with rifle bluing never occurred to me. Thanks, Russell!
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