Poetry in America with Elisa New (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - Those Winter Sundays - full transcript

I'm so happy to be here

with Vice President Joe Biden

to read a poem with me,
"Those Winter Sundays"

by 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?

Maybe I am like most readers,

who probably is reading this
thinking about the author,

Robert Hayden, and his father,

but immediately, my own
childhood and my own father.

Morning after morning,

my father would be shoveling
the driveway,



you know, making these lines
back and forth

to allow the day to go on,
allow the day to begin.

My father used to
put on the fires in the morning.

I heard him every morning

with an axe in the kitchen
make kindling.

My father worked as a skycap.

He got up early every day.

He never talked about that job

as something that he wanted to
do or that he had aspired to do,

but he did it because he knew

what was necessary
for his family.

I had a dad who
was... he was a sheep farmer

doing really tough,
backbreaking work.

The effect of that is sort
of austerity, that severity,

the harshness.

Getting up early,

the hard work
and the cracked hands.

My father did have calluses
all over his hands,

so it does remind me
a lot of it, absolutely.

I found the poem in high school,

and I found the inability
to really express love,

but the wish to express love
was so pulsing and powerful.

I never got to know my father

until he got sick.

I know we used to visit him
every week.

He lived in Saugus
in a nursing home,

and I got to know him more.

Like, I never knew his father
died at 34 years old.

It's funny how a poem

can sort of creep
into your soul, you know?

And, you know,
and you go, "Oh, okay."

You can feel it,
you can picture it.

When students come to study

African-American poetry with me,

I can pretty much guarantee

that they've read this poem
in high school

and, usually,
that they have not known

that it was written
by an African-American poet,

which is interesting,

because I think
that it is a very black poem

in important ways
that we can talk about.

But I think it also is a poem

whose particulars
are quite transcendent.

The poet Robert Hayden was born

in Paradise Valley,

one of the poorest black
neighborhoods in Detroit.

When two-year-old Hayden's
parents separated,

he was adopted by neighbors
into a household as strict

as his first home was turbulent.

This title,
"Those Winter Sundays,"

gathers a lot of memories
into one.

It seems like it is alluding
to something

which must been ritualistic.

If you start at the first line,

"Sundays too my father got up
early,"

I mean, I was raised
in a household

where my dad worked
all the time.

He got up at 4:00,

and he'd leave the house
by 5:00,

and he'd have to clean
the snow outside.

And then he worked inside
mopping floors

and scraping chocolate around
the machines and stuff.

Where did he work?

Nabisco.

My father worked so hard,

we didn't see him that often.

He left for work
Saturday morning,

and came home Sunday morning.

He worked all straight through.

That was the way of life
years ago.

And I ended up doing
the same thing he did.

Here's Robert Hayden
growing up in Detroit

in the 1920s and '30s.

He's taking us back
to the Depression.

And so I think that all of that
is in there and under there

in these very, very
specific details.

"Aching," "cracked,"
"blueblack."

In the very sounds, in the
sonic patterns of this stanza,

we hear the painful, brittle
sharpness of Detroit cold.

"Sundays too my father
got up early

and put his clothes on
in the blueblack cold."

On the page, it looks
quite startling

because you have this repetition
of the "B" sound.

"Blueblack cold."
- "Blueblack cold."

"Blueblack cold."

So each syllable is stressed.

"Blueblack cold."

It calls attention to itself.

"Blueblack cold."
- "Blueblack cold."

It's giving you a visual image

to an abstract invisible.

It's a different way
to describe the cold.

You know, I've never heard it
described with a color.

"Blueblack" to me means bitter,
dark, miserable cold.

It is not just dark,
but it is, like,

a lonely kind of,
you could say stillness.

Isn't it extraordinary
the way the blue

gives it the loneliness?

Yes, exactly.

And then to make blueblack
into one word,

I mean, it's just... it's, it's,
it's really beautiful.

Really, if the poem were
just two lines,

I think it would still be,
like, gorgeous.

But I think, also, you know,
"blueblack" is sometimes used

to describe skin color...

A very, very dark skin
in a black person.

And I think that blues
is in there, too.

I really consider that
the little clue

that lets us understand
that later on,

we're in a blues space.

Detroit, in the 1920s and '30s,
the blues are everywhere.

I mean, this would have been
ambient sound.

And the song, which would have
been a song

that Hayden would have heard
as a child,

"Black and Blue?"

Do you think black and blue?

Yes, absolutely.

I think black and blue
is in there,

and the wounds self-inflicted
and inflicted by labor and time.

"Then with cracked hands
that ached."

Guys' dads worked either
in the coal mines

or in the salt factory.

Their hands would literally be
cracked.

They don't usually wear gloves

because they need the feel
of the hands, the fingers.

I was a boat builder for many
years, so I never wore gloves.

My hands were cracked;
I could relate.

He'd go out in the cold,
cold, freezing, come back,

bank the fire downstairs,
and heat up the house.

"Then with cracked hands

"that ached from labor
and the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze."

It's not our time of comfort

where we can go to a thermostat
that might automatically pop on

at 7:00 in the morning.

Someone has to actually
literally get up,

make sure there are coals.

When you bank a fire,

it doesn't burn as fast,
so it'll last the night.

You know, the heat will come up
gradually.

You literally haven't moved
from, you know,

from the back down forward.

You have to tend
to a banked fire, too.

You kind of constantly, you
know, keep an eye on it.

But, but it will last
much longer than a blazing fire.

"Made" is hanging
there at the end of that line,

and so, you know, you just
linger a little bit,

and you're like "made,"
and then "banked fires blaze."

So there's just a micro-pause,
almost,

and it gives it just a little...

so, his father, I guess
is a maker, you know.

And, yeah, you feel it
a little more.

"Blueblack cold,"
"banked fires," "blaze."

The "B" of "banked"
with the "blaze."

And it's almost like
the response

to that "blueblack cold,"

through what
the father has done.

"Banked" has an economic
connotation, too.

It made me think about thrift.

And about security,

which is obviously what the poem
is about, right?

It's about, you know, safety
and security and giving.

"No one ever thanked him."

"No one ever thanked him."

"No one ever thanked him."

It was like, well,
that's what he's supposed to do.

That's what dads
are supposed to do.

What was I going
to thank him for?

I mean, why would I do that?

That's just, that's just
what's supposed to happen.

I probably could have thanked
him a lot more, absolutely.

Um...

But, um...

But I sure as hell
respected him.

Not only did he not
ever thank his father,

but maybe no one else did,
either.

And maybe even beyond the
family, no one ever thanked him.

I mean, it's a pretty lonely
figure that's painted here.

Oh, I'm so glad that you had
used the word "lonely"

for the "blueblack."

I hadn't realized

the "loneliness of no one
ever thanked him"

is already intimated
in that "blueblack."

Yeah.

Right, this sort of, you know,

if there could be
a color of isolation,

I guess it would be blueblack.

The speaker of that line...

"No one ever thanked him"...

Seems to be the speaker
of the rest of the poem,

but ages and ages hence.

Someone looking back
on this time.

It crystallizes the relationship
as one that has developed,

and one that has evolved.

You know, he has this
different perspective now.

He's looking back and seeing
where he made these mistakes.

"Those Winter Sundays"
is a carefully made poem

whose form orchestrates
its emotional impact.

We are five lines in
with a stanza break

before the speaker even awakens
to his father's labors.

Another four lines,
and then a third stanza.

Five lines, for a total of 14.

It is a sonnet.

The sonnet form is an amount
of poem

that lets you do everything,
but economically.

So it's a perfect, perfect
little box

in which you can make
the whole world happen.

This is an irregular sonnet.

It doesn't divide into
eight lines... an octet...

And six lines... a sestet...
Like a Petrarchan sonnet,

or into three quatrains
and a couplet,

like a Shakespearean sonnet.

Hayden is playing
around with the form,

whether consciously or not,
because, of course,

poets absorb forms
that are this fundamental.

The sonnets, this form lets us
talk about love.

But for Hayden, it is
that refusal to fully enter

what that form has been,
including in the subject matter.

I mean, this is not
about romantic love.

No. - It is about love, though.

"I'd wake and hear the
cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm,
he'd call."

I picture the heat
started to come up

through the register,
and that frost on the window,

it's starting to dissipate
a little bit.

And you can lay... you can stick
your foot outside the blanket

and, you know,
the image I have is

that because of what dad did
early that morning,

he's shattering that, that cold.

"The splintering and
the breaking,"

which is a kind of a good thing,
I guess,

in that the cold
is starting to change

on account of what
the father has done.

But "splintering," "breaking"...

They're not sort
of very positive.

"I'd wake and hear
the cold splintering, breaking.

"When the rooms were warm,
he'd call,

and slowly I would rise
and dress."

There are lots of
positive, direct representations

of the father doing good.

But the big kind of negative
is this word "anger."

The speaker says, "I would rise
and dress,

fearing the chronic angers
of that house."

One thing I can say
as a psychologist,

not as a poet or a writer,

is that when there is
uncertainty or confusion,

it makes your attention
very sticky.

So the fact that I am not given
an explanation

for the chronic angers
of that house, you know,

you come back to that and
you, like... you want to know.

It's a very complex
relationship that I saw.

When you read the fearful,
chronic fearfulness

in the house.

There's some sort of drama
going on in that house.

This poem has always
appeared with,

on the opposite side,
"The Whipping."

And "The Whipping" begins,

"The old woman across the way is
whipping her grandson again."

For a child to be
fearful in his own house,

that's shocking,

but the way the anger is
transferred to the house,

there's a, there's a degree
of understatement there.

But it only it only heightens
that emotion.

I read that as he didn't
think where he lived

was particularly commodious.

I'm part of a community
that is poor, that is...

Yes. - That is left behind.

When I think of the word
"chronic,"

I think of chronic arthritis.

I think of a chronic condition.

Oh, yeah, chronic is a word
associated with disease

or with patterns
one would break.

Yes. - If one could.

Yes, and so I think

that there's something
also very powerful

about poverty, about poverty's
effect on the body,

about the kind of work
that this man has to do,

and its effects on his body.

I assumed it meant,
"Hey, Dad, I'm sorry,

"but I had all these problems
and, you know,

"I lived in a lousy
neighborhood, man.

"It was the toughest
neighborhood in Detroit.

"And, Dad, you weren't around.

"And, Dad, the house was
a lousy house we lived in.

And, damn, Dad, in the winter
it was a bear."

There's also the anger
of the house itself,

when the pipes bang and
the frame creaks on itself.

"Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes
as well."

There could be ambivalence.

I mean, who doesn't have
ambivalence

toward their parents?

Like all young kids,
we're selfish.

We're, we don't realize what
we do to our fathers and mothers

or family, for that matter.

You're just interested
in your own self being.

Discipline may be
required in order to accomplish

the things that we want to
accomplish in life, and this is

a parental responsibility
to instill that

into a child who, in this poem,

is resistant to this type
of prodding,

but must be prodded
if it is to succeed in life.

It seems like there's
a normal routine on Sunday

that the child must feel obliged
to follow.

Whatever it is, he seems to want
to still retreat to his blanket

and his sheet and his corner
of the room

that he's decided
is more comforting.

It stands out that the
word "cold" appears

in every stanza.

And that cold changes.

It begins as "blueblack cold."

In the second stanza, the cold's
splintering, breaking.

Something's starting to change.

And by the third stanza,
the cold has been driven out.

So this gives a kind of
continuity to the poem,

but it also gives us
a sense of change.

The temperature kind of changes,

and he kind of reflects,
you know,

from when he was a young child
and he didn't

thank his father for all the
things that he did, you know.

At the end, he reflects on the
father even polishing his shoes,

probably to go to Sunday
service, I imagine.

The father

will perform
a very humble act of service.

That goes back, you know, to
the Bible and otherwise, right?

I mean, there's something,
you know,

the ultimate act of humility
is to bow down

and touch someone's feet
or to wash their feet,

in this case, you know,
polishing shoes.

It's, like, the father puts
himself below the son.

I can picture that father
polishing his son's shoes

as a way of showing
how much he loved him.

I mean, he loved him.

There was not ever any doubt
that we felt that we were loved,

even though my father
never spoke the words.

It was more expressed
with the way they acted

and what they did for you,

that there was no doubt
that there was love there.

"What did I know,
what did I know

of love's austere
and lonely offices?"

"Of love's austere
and lonely offices."

"Offices."

That's part of...
- You're an officeholder.

- No, no...

What is...
how should we read that?

- Well, I think that he views
being a father like an office,

like it is a responsibility.

"You chose this.

"You chose to have me.

This is a responsibility
that you have."

And... but it's lonely.

It's sometimes very tough
having to fulfill the functions

of that office, of fatherhood.

And, of course, offices
in the sense of...

You know, it takes us right back
to Sundays, right?

In the sense of sort of
religious offices.

I mean, it's a poem that is a...

Right, it's about ritual.

Ritual and about, I think,
religious meditation

in the absence of church.

But here, it's love's offices.

It's as though love is
performing this service,

this duty.

Why would you
describe love as an obligation

that is austere,
without decoration,

without comfort, and lonely?

And, you know, of course, that
ties the whole poem together

because, like, that is
his father's life.

In some ways, our love for
another person can be lonely,

particularly the love between
parents and children.

"What did I know,
what did I know

of love's austere
and lonely offices?"

I was wondering about the
repetition, "What did I know?"

- I think it's, like, really...
"Mea culpa, mea culpa,

mea maxima culpa," you know?

"I am sorry, I am sorry,
I am heartily sorry."

Like, "God, what did I know?"

This person has been
thinking about their father

and coming to understand
their father's love for them.

But that's almost all thought
to get to that point.

And this moment of repetition
is a moment of pure emotion.

"What did I know,
what did I know?"

I mean, you know, when we say
things twice it's often because,

you know, we're just overflowing
with emotion.

That's the blues at the end...

"What did I know,
what did I know?"

It has to be repeated.

It's a lament.

You know, it's got that...
and that repetition,

borrowed from the blues,
that enables you, also,

to take a story
that is a personal story

and make it universal.

The blues is a form that allows
us to transcend,

but it is not a triumphal form.

Part of its real accomplishment

that is very much in
an African-American tradition

is, how do you take received
forms, forms that, you know,

come from Europe, have been
around as long as the sonnet,

and turn them and infuse them
with the sounds and structures

and forms of African-American
culture?

And in a country where we are
all hybrids, right?

Where heterogeneity
is what defines us,

and so what could be
more natural

than writing the English sonnet,
Shakespeare sonnet,

in the blues?

To sing it in that way is,

I think,
what so powerfully turns

and then resolves the poem,

although we're left with...
the resolution is the question.

The resolution is the eternal
generational, you know...

I could not have imagined
what my parents...

I couldn't have imagined.
I couldn't have imagined.

Where does the emotion in
these last two lines come from?

- I think it comes from, you
know, realization, maturation,

having to deal with the things
your dad dealt with as an adult.

Now you are an adult.

Yes.

Don't you find, as a mother,

you look back, and you say
to yourself sometimes,

"How did my mom do that?"

Or, "How did my dad do that?"

Because I'm trying to do it
right now.

The development of understanding
is, you know,

the happy story of humanity.

Most people do develop insight
and empathy,

appreciation
over their life course.

We do get better in that sense.

Our character does develop.

And maybe this is also
why the poem must resonate

with so many people.

To this day, I feel sorry

I didn't get to know my father.

I envy people that still have,
you know, relatives alive,

and I try to put it
in my perspective

of my three children.

And it's the same with them.

They're closer to their mother
than they are to me

because the mother nurtures them
and brings them up,

where the father goes out
for a living.

So it's kind of hard.

The story that's told

about Hayden's recording
this poem

when he was the poet laureate

is that this was a poem
that he could not finish reading

because he always broke down.

- Because he cracked.
- Yeah.

Because he cracked, exactly.