Poem 4: “Those Winter Sundays”

Robert Hayden’s "Those Winter Sundays" is one of those poems that can be very easy to teach. It’s short. The diction is lovely. Its narrative is easy to understand, even for younger student.  It’s an easy success in the classroom, but I’ll probably never teach it again.

My father got up every morning. The rest of us were still in bed for hours while he was busy at one kind of work or another. Weekdays he was at the office. Weekends, he might be out at the lumber yard, dumping off recycling, or working on the latest project out in the garage. In the winter, he too got up and woke the embers into a fire before the rest of us were out of bed.

I read Hayden’s poem from time to time now, but I simply can’t get through it without breaking down. I wonder if my father began to know how much we all love him.