Diction In Those Winter Sundays

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Letters can be strung together to create words that express love, whether it is understood by others or not. However, there is a handful of people that express their love through actions. In “Those Winter Sundays”, author Robert Hayden describes the actions a father takes to express his love and affection towards his son, the speaker. With the use of the son’s point of view, emotion, and explicit diction, the author is able to show that there are various ways to express love to another in hopes to bring the reader to understand that, sometimes, truly understanding another’s love and intentions means being placed in another’s shoes. Because Hayden frames the story from the son's adolescent point of view, the reader is fully able to recognize and understand the …show more content…
In the beginning stanza, the speaker uses words such as “blueblack,” “cracked,” and “ached” to emphasize the arduous labor the father experienced. It feels almost as if the speaker once had sympathy for him when he indicates that his “father got up early” on Sundays “too,” implying that he also awoke early every other day as well. Similar harsh diction continues through the next stanza when the speaker recalls hearing the cold “splintering” and “breaking,” as it metaphorically represents the relationship between the father and the son. In the final stanza, the speaker proclaims that he spoke “indifferently” to his father after he had “driven out in the cold,” making the speaker seem ashamed of doing so. Furthermore, the speaker describes his received love as “austere” as he did not feel that his father’s love was enough. With that, the final stanza reflects the son’s emotions (remorse, guilt, and regret) as an adult regarding their relationship years before. Conclusively, the diction utilized throughout the poem may have rooted from fear of the relationship from the

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