Some poems hit you like a gut-punch and you wonder why.
Yes, Hayden’s theme hurts. Who of us thanks a parent adequately? By the time we realize they might be thanked, that they were human like us, it’s too late. Parents to their young children are facts, like boulders, not damp pulsing organisms, vulnerable, unsure: our encouragers, if we’re lucky, but also our jailers, who stand in our way. They exist to be scaled, trounced, superseded. We do not love them for we do not yet know what love is. Love is born of loneliness, which takes time to learn. One might as well rail against the sky.
Is any adult satisfied how they’ve treated their parent? While I rebuke mine, because that’s what hindsight sees, my criticisms feel unkind. The dead are defenseless. Who am I to kick them when they’re down? And I turned out OK, didn’t I, by my lights, after some doing? Credit where credit’s due!
One hardly needs to be told Hayden’s childhood was hard: his little poem clenches like a boyish fist. We feel the poet in his cold bed reviling his dad for rousing him on a Sunday morning, when he might have slept in. Child abuse! And who was his dad anyway, a poor laborer with cracked hands who’d crudded their home with “chronic angers”. Already the boy feels himself superior to his surroundings, “speaking indifferently,” lovelessly, to his father, restless to fly the coop.
And yes, his condescension discredits him, and yes, he’s sorry, with a sorrow familiar to many who’ve buried forbears. He should have been less self-immersed, more grateful – mea culpa!
The theme packs a punch. But it is less the theme than the poem’s music which explains its startling power.
In poetry, the music does the talking. Few themes are original: humans haven’t changed that much over millennia. What hurt Homer’s hearers hurts me, which is why we can read him now. But the timbre of every voice is distinct and revelatory. How we speak confesses more than our words.
Track the k-sounds in these three little stanzas: blueblack, cracked, ached, weekday, banked, thanked, wake, break, chronic, speaking. They crackle. Crackling is not soothing. It is the sound of breaking, suspenseful, destructive. Fire crackles as it devours. Glass cracks as it shatters. Ice cracks as it shifts. Crackling feels like noise, not music, almost music’s contradiction.
All that crackling alerts us to the disharmony in this boy’s house. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, after the poem’s tenth line, the crackling relents. You may not have noticed this but your ear has. The ak-sounds are replaced by more melodious notes. The consonants have calmed – into softer sibilants, fricatives, and murmurous m’s and n’s. M’s, n’s, f’s, and s’s feel less likely to attack. And that whoosh of o’s: polished, good, shoes, know, know, lonely, austere (whose au is almost an o) and – a noun that resounds like cathedral bell – offices.
These are the harmonies of forgiveness, reunion, a tenderness long withheld but now tendered. Too late for the father, vanished, vanquished, but not for the son, who is redeemed by his regret.
In my college years there was a sappy popular romance with the tagline, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” This poem reminds us that exculpation is backward. Love means always having to say you’re sorry, for love can never repay an inestimable gift. Such late remorse does not right the wrong, but it salves the wound. And besides, love, committed to its “austere and lonely offices,” labored with no expectation of thanks.
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Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden (1913-1980
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?