Synesthetic Imagery In Robert Hayden's 'Blueblack Cold'

“Those Winter Sundays” is a short lyric poem. It is written in a simple language and is clear and precise. Its metaphors are those of everyday life. The opening stanza of the poem, which refers to “my father,” establishes a first-person speaker. It also shows that the speaker is recalling a time when he was a child. The speaker presents us with the atmosphere around which his father worked. For example in lines one and two, “Sundays too my father got up early/blueblack cold” (1-2). Here the “Sundays”, and the “early” signifies the great devotion of speaker’s father. He gets up early even on Sundays,

She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning: and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.” The words she uses radiates the devotion between

The survival of the Black American family is a revolutionary act. The system of slavery purposefully separated and destroyed black families. Yet, in the face of obstacles, the Black family as an institution survived. Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden show the power of connection, love, and learning between the Black parent and the Black child. Many Black poets write about the Black experience in America, but few capture the interactions between Black parent and Black child the way Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden do in their poems “Mother to Son” and “Those Winter Sundays”, respectively. Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden use metaphors and imagery to portray the lessons Black children learn from Black parents.

The night air was heavy with silence. Clouds drifted across a calm sky, and a full moon shone in the distance. In a small hut on the outskirts of the valley, an old man lay in bed, awake in the peaceful slumber of the village. His breaths came in rattling gasps, his forehead burned, and his joints felt stiff with pain. He shifted on the blankets, his withered hands clenched in fists as he tried to suppress the wave of bitter memories coming to him. His life had been nothing more than work, loss, tragedy. He remembered all of his hope, his ambition, in his youth, and he smiled bitterly. No one would remember him as the man that he had once hoped he would become. Now, as his breathing became heavier and he felt himself fading on the brink of

Authors tend to write on subjects that they know the most about, or subjects that affect them on a personal level. Authors and poets use various aspects of life for the basis of their works, such as life experiences, romances, and family roles. Poems like “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden and “Forgiving My Father” by Lucille Clifton feature one of the most important roles in a family: a father. The two poems differ vastly in many regards, but many similarities surface among them and a common theme resides between them. Through the similarities they hold, the poems represent a common theme of regret for one’s lack of action.

An older boy remembered his father, a hardworking blue collar man. He remembered how his father would walk into the home each evening with scraped hands and perspiration stained shirts. His father was a tough man. He was the kind of man that refused to go to the doctor and rarely hugged his children. Yet, he was a good man. The boy remembered how his father provided for the family and often times his smallest actions proved his paternal love for them. One particular memory stood out among the rest. His father had returned home from work late one evening. He had been out celebrating his pay raise with some of his co-workers down at the local pub. He waltzed through the door bursting with

I vividly remember that chilly night in March as I walked out of Fifer, the building my father now calls home, for the first time. I had goosebumps, but they were not from the cold I felt hit my skin. Instead, they were from the sickness in my stomach. As I got in the car, I began to cry and had to stop myself from running back inside. My entire world had turned upside-down. How could I go home without my father? How could I leave him in a nursing home, a place where he was too young and mentally fit to be confined? I had to fight the feeling that he didn’t belong. I had to remind myself of why he chose to be there, and I hated it.

My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me.... He was running at my side, out of breath, at the end of his strength, at his wit’s end. I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his only support.”

This could hardly mean that Hayden, who had grown up in a black slum, who had faced racial obstacles throughout his life, and who had steeped himself in African American history would ignore or downplay the black experience in his work. On the contrary, most of his significant poems are careful reflections on this experience. Rather, his emphasis on “common humanity” is to be seen in how he presents this ethnic experience within a broad philosophical framework and in how he reserves special attention for molding a personal language and style that draw on, without being subsumed by, black English. One of the major focuses of Hayden’s work is religion. A turning point in the poet’s life came when he abandoned the fundamentalist Christianity of his youth to embrace the Baha’í religion, a faith that emphasizes the underlying unity of all religious credos and of all races. The Baha’í religion provided a pattern of belief that would inform many of his poems. In Words in the Mourning Time, for example, it is only a faith in the evolving brotherhood of all peoples that leads the poem’s

Imagery is used throughout the poem to emphasize the finite time humans have on the earth, and how every second should be appreciated. Lines two and three are the speaker’s first use of imagery. Diction in line two illustrates the speaker’s recognition of the phenomena, which is snow in October. The phrase “But this morning” (line 2) highlights that the meaning is not a mundane morning. Most people would be agitated that winter came early, but the speaker seems to be grateful. Furthermore, the speaker describes the snow in a pleasant tone, seen in this line “pale muslin/ stretched across the grass” (line 2-3). This emphasizes that the speaker appricates the early

The father did not acquire cracked hands from work in the cold, but rather “labor in the weekday weather” (line 4). Labor today one would associate with farming, working in a factory; very hard physical ‘work’, making the role of the father in this case seem all the more laborious. The first stanza ends with “No one ever thanked him” (line 5) which gives the poem a brief pause, leading the reader to assume that perhaps his father has passed away recently. The love shown by the speaker’s father is now recognized, but it is too late to give thanks. When the speaker wakes and his father calls him downstairs, he dresses slowly for he fears the “chronic angers of that house” (line 9). ‘Chronis angers,’ the reason for the boy’s hesitation to dress and go downstairs, illustrates the extreme amount of tension that must have been present in the house. The speaker mentions talking indifferently to his father, followed by “who had driven out the cold” (line 11) as though now he recognizes that he had never treated his father as a loving one even though he got up every morning to do this great chore for his family. The poem ends with the question “What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lovely offices?” (line 14) admitting the speakers adolescent ignorance and obvious answer of nothing. The way the author chose and arranged these words completely defines the story he is trying to tell and the point he is trying to make.

At the beginning of the poem, it becomes apparent to the reader that the poem takes on a very dull tone from the title itself. “Those Winter Sundays” shows that the poem is gloomy and sad as opposed to summer days that are usually filled with brightness and warmth. Early in the poem, Hayden uses examples of imagery to show the diligence and hard work of the father. He states “Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blue-black cold” (Hayden 968). By using colors to describe the coldness of the house it allows to the reader to create a lucid image of what it must feel like. “Blue-black cold” suggests that inside the house it is as cold as when someone’s face or lips turn blue or black from the freezing weather. Another example of the father’s fine work ethic was Hayden’s choice of the words “Sundays too” rather than just saying “On Sundays”. Daniel Landau stated in an article “In the book of genesis, Chapter 2, versus 2 and 3, it is written that he rested on the seventh day, and sanctified it” (Landau). This gives a clear idea of the fact that the father works every day of the week, even on Sundays, which is usually a day that most people prefer to rest. By doing this, the reader can automatically visualize the effort that the father puts into the well-being of not only himself but his child as well.

In the poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, the speaker is reflecting on his past with his father, but mainly the Sunday mornings he experienced during his childhood. Throughout the poem, there also happens to be a very dark and possibly even somber tone, which is shown by using several different types of literary devices. Hayden utilizes strong imagery supported by diction and substantial symbolism comprehensively. Furthermore, there are various examples of both alliteration and assonances. The poem does not rhyme and its meter has little to no order. Although the father labors diligently all day long, and he still manages to be a caring person in his son’s life. The poem’s main conflict comes from the son not realizing how good his father actually was to him until he was much older. When the speaker was a young boy, he regarded his father as a callous man due to his stern attitude and apparent lack of proper affection towards him. Now that the son is older, he discovers that even though his father did not express his love in words, he consistently did with his acts of kindness and selflessness.

Robert Hayden was a man who worked with what he had instead of dreaming of what he does not have. Pursuing what he loves to do even when people would put him down or not acknowledge him. Being an African American poet was not easy during Hayden’s lifetime, being born in 1913, integration was not something people were excited about. After some hard times and hard work, he was able to prove himself to the poetic community, "Robert Hayden is now generally accepted as the most outstanding craftsman of Afro-American poetry" (Glaysher). It wasn’t an easy task for him to accomplish, with his work being quite rare of having a common topic of African American history and hardships. But Hayden wasn’t looking to be known as an

In both “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden and “forgiving my father” by Lucille Clifton, the speakers have deep discontent with their fathers. They both describe issues they had with their father when they were a child, which resulted in lack of respect. In contrast, both poems show a different healing outcome of the child, that is now an adult, and their lasting opinions of their father. Both poems represent a way a child can deal with a childhood issue with a parent and what it is like to either overcome it or still have it festering inside.