Robert Hayden

• Born Asa Bundy Sheffey on August 4, 1913

• Robert Hayden was raised in the poor neighbourhood in Detroit called
Paradise Valley.
• He had an emotionally tumultuous childhood and was shuttled between
the home of his parents and that of a foster family, who lived next door.
• Because of impaired vision, he was unable to participate in sports, but
was able to spend his time reading.
• In 1932, he graduated from high school and, with the help of a
scholarship, attended Detroit City College. In 1975, Hayden received the
Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and in 1976, he became the first
black American to be appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of
Congress.
• He died in on February 25, 1980
Analysis
 Glossary

• banked - heaped up to form a mound

• chronic – constant, happening all the time
• indifferently – not caring, having no feeling for someone
• austere - serious, harsh, sombre
• offices – service done for others
• synaesthesia – when one kind of sense is experienced by another,
e.g. the sweet taste of pink
Sundays too
my father got up early

and put his clothes on

in the blueblack
blueblack cold,
then with
cracked
from labor in the weekday weather
madehands thatblaze.
banked fires blaze.

ached
No one
ever
thanked him.
“too” – father got up early every day, including
Sundays (traditional day of rest)

Formal word choice – cold/distant relationship

Before sunrise (early). Very cold.
The room is dark – a sombre blue-black colour.
Could refer to the colour the lips/skin turns when it is
very cold.

Consonance “b” – creates feeling of

being hit in the face by a cold wind
Does hard physical labour

“ached”, “blaze” (“long sounding a)

assonance- slow, mournful sound
 He lights the fireplaces in the house to warm up
the house before the children wake up.
Alliteration –echoes cold and unhappy condition of the father

The children took their father for granted. They did not
thank him for his sacrifices
 Shift to speaker himself

Hyperbole: Emphasises the cold winters

Metaphor: the cold is compared to wood that

splinters/breaks as it is chopped and used to make
fire.
Contrast to his father who laboured at the crack of dawn
to support his family and keep them warm.
 Personification
House itself is People in the
angry? OR house (family)?
“cold” attitude – keeps distance due to tense,
angry relationship between father and son
Adult speaker realises these are
gestures of love.
Rhetorical question – emphasize his childlike
innocence at the time; it also emphasizes the
child’s regret later on in life
Repetition – realisation that he did not
understand anything when he was a
child
IMAGERY:of a workplace; a parent never stops working;
the boy’s father went to work on weekdays, but seldom
rested because on Sundays he still worked in the house for
the sake of his children.

Love is harsh and lonely

Parental love is a duty, a form of worship and
responsibility, an official job.
Tone of regret. Mood is sad/bitter.
 THEME
The theme is love, the deep and serious familial love between a parent
and a child. It is the type of love that gets you up at the crack of dawn,
even when you’re exhausted from a long week of hard work. This love is
quiet and brave; it’s not showy, so it can easily slip by unnoticed. Just as
the speaker doesn’t understand the nature of his father’s love until he’s
grown, we don’t understand the poem’s form to be a sonnet
(untraditional) until we finish it (and realize in retrospect that it has
fourteen lines). So there's a delayed, or belated, recognition of love (and
its many forms) for both the speaker and for us, the readers.