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Robert Hayden: Those Winter Sundays
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?
~~~~
© 1966 by Robert Hayden, from COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT HAYDEN by Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1966).
Robert Hayden (1913 – 1980) was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Ruth and Asa Sheffey, who separated before his birth. He was taken in by a foster family next door, Sue Ellen Westerfield and William Hayden, and grew up in the Detroit neighborhood called “Paradise Valley”.
His childhood traumas resulted in debilitating bouts of depression that he later called “my dark nights of the soul”. Because he was nearsighted and slight of stature, he was often ostracized by his peers. In response, Hayden read voraciously, developing both an ear and an eye for transformative qualities in literature. He attended Detroit City College (later called Wayne State University) with a major in Spanish and minor in English and left in 1936 during the Great Depression, one credit short of finishing his degree, to go to work for the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project, where he researched black history and folk culture.
Leaving the Federal Writers’ Project in 1938, Hayden married Erma Morris in 1940 and published his first volume, Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940). He enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1941 and won a Hopwood Award there. Raised as a Baptist, he followed his wife into the Bahá’í Faith during the early 1940s, and raised a daughter, Maia, in the religion. Hayden became one of the best-known Bahá’í poets. Erma Hayden was a pianist and composer and served as supervisor of music for Nashville public schools.
In pursuit of a master’s degree, Hayden studied under W. H. Auden, who directed his attention to issues of poetic form, technique, and artistic discipline. Auden’s influence may be seen in the “technical pith of Hayden’s verse”. After finishing his degree in 1942, then teaching several years at the University of Michigan, Hayden went to Fisk University in 1946, where he remained for 23 years, returning to the University of Michigan in 1969 to complete his teaching career (1969-80).
By the 1960s and the rise of the Black Arts Movement, when a more youthful era of Afro-American artists composed politically and emotionally charged protest poetry overwhelmingly coordinated to a black audience, Hayden’s philosophy about the function of poetry and the way he characterized himself as an author were settled. Hayden stayed consistent with his idea of poetry as an artistic frame instead of a polemical demonstration and to his conviction that poetry ought to, in addition to other things, address the qualities shared by mankind, including social injustice.
His work often addressed the plight of African Americans, usually using his former home of Paradise Valley slum as a backdrop, as he does in the poem “Heart-Shape in the Dust”. He made ready use of black vernacular and folk speech, and he wrote political poetry as well, including a sequence on the Vietnam War.
The impact of Euro-American innovation on Hayden’s poetry and also his continuous assertions that he needed to be viewed as an “American poet” as opposed to a “black poet” prompted much feedback of him as an abstract “Uncle Tom” by Afro-American critics during the 1960s. However, Afro-American history, contemporary black figures, for example, Malcolm X, and Afro-American communities, especially Hayden’s native Paradise Valley, were the subjects of a significant number of his poems.
On April 7, 1966, Hayden’s Ballad of Remembrance was awarded, by unanimous vote, the Grand Prize for Poetry at the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. The festival had more than ten thousand people from thirty-seven nations in attendance. However, on April 22, 1966, Hayden was denounced at a Fisk University conference of black writers by a group of young protest poets led by Melvin Tolson for refusing to identify himself as a black poet.
Hayden was elected to the American Academy of Poets in 1975.
[bio adapted from Wiki]
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This is a wonderful poem. Thanks for posting it again, Michael.
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Ever since I first read this poem many years ago, I have thought that everyone should learn to ask that last question, should learn about ‘love’s austere and lonely offices’. It has helped me to have more compassion, even now.
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Thanks, Jan. I have had the exact same experience with the poem. It has helped me to have more tolerance for my own father who was a difficult sometimes violent man.
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This is one of my favorite poems. It’s simplicity holds such deep love. We read this at my father’s funeral. Thank you, Michael, for sharing this with us.
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How wonderful that your family read the poem at your father’s funeral. I wish I had thought of doing that at my father’s funeral.
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This poem moves me every single time. Thank you, Michael, for choosing it for this winter Sunday.
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I’ve read this poem to myself at least a hundred times, and I used to recite it to my students to wow them. It is arguably the best poem ever written by an American.
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I remember teaching this poem in my Modern American Lit classes. The students loved it, loved it for the way he talked about the cold and the way he talked about his family life.
haven’t read it for years. Thank you for posting it and reminding me how good a poet he was.
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My students loved it too.
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i run out of words before I run out of wonder of this poem. What would poetry be without it? This is the day for this poem: 27 degrees outside—Its been 20 years, We now watch our children in their parenthood. Yesterday in the dark with a flashlight, I picked greens that had come up in the swale-bottom of the pasture along the road knowing they’ll be ransacked by the cold this morning. It was the last chance of the winter to gather them. We’d been waiting a month for rain and this cold is all that’s come. They wait On the diningroom table in a green bundle, I’ll cook them as the sun comes up.
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the cold? Here in Virginia I’ve been stuck in the house for almost two weeks. The streets haven’t been plowed. The snow and ice and wind and cold make it impossible to get to the mailbox. Thankfully the mail isn’t being delivered.
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I suppose its always in frames of reference of our lives. My urgency is based on keeping 300 cows and calves in grass. We just lost it all this week. What do we do next?
I wish I could say, but for now, the pot is on the stove, orb in the sky,
…Two poets speaking
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Yes, frame of reference. I grew up in Chicago. When I would complained about the snow and cold, my dad would laugh. He had spent 4 years as a prisoner in Buchenwald concentration camp. Here’s a piece I wrote about it.
Winters in Buchenwald
He remembered the frozen bodies.
Some looked like they had been cemented in the ice, heads and hands and knees above the ice line, stomachs and feet below.
The prisoners who died this way must have been trying to raise themselves out of the freezing water, but the water froze too quickly.
Some of the living prisoners peeled coats and pants from the bodies of the frozen dead, but my father didn’t.
He stood there staring at the dead. Their legs were black with frostbite, their pricks shriveled to the size of acorns.
He never forgot the lesson he learned. A frozen naked man was a miserable thing.
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Thanks for your powerful witness, crafted well, and Like Hayden’s poem, the ending overwhelms. How some of us turn humans into things. The first word of your poem He, while the last word is thing. and the two separated by his witness (and your and his beautiful compassion).
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thank you. I’ve never noticed that conflict between the first and last word.
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A powerful poem, John. Thank you for sharing it.
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