Greater Boston Arts Highlight

Robert Pinsky on
"Those Winter Sundays"

I was very struck, when I was reading through the letters that the Favorite Poem project has received -- and this means browsing through letters and e-mails culled from 20,000 people -- that this poem of Robert Hayden's came up very often, and a tremendously wide variety of people, people of different ages and regions and ethnicities, said quite moving things about this particular poem.

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback 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?
- From Collected Poems by Robert Hayden. Copyright © 1971 Erma Hayden. Liveright Publishing Corporation.

A poem, as distinct from a movie, or an essay, or a song, produces that emotional effect through a series of little grunts we make when we communicate. Sometimes people break their necks creating fancy rhetoric and large language, or regional accents, or big words, or obscenities. This rhetoric is so quiet:

Sundays too my father got up early

It could be something somebody says in a conversation on the bus. There's nothing oratorical about it:

Sundays too my father got up early And put his clothes on

--and put his clothes on. It's so plain, it's like flour and milk and eggs, the ingredients-

in the blueblack cold,

And blueblack is like one little touch, reminding us that he could be fancy and that he is eloquent. But it's mostly very restrained:

then with cracked hands that ached from labor

Ached, it's wonderful, the way it has the same vowel as labor and the same consonant as cracked:

then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze.

Three real strong one-syllable words: banked, fire, blaze. And then this -- that gets it high again-- then, right after banked fired blaze:

No one every thanked him.

So deadpan and plain: No one ever thanked him.

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

--sound of a fire, wonderfully imagined.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

--again, so plain.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Ordinary ingredients: I would dress, that house. The chronic angers, abstract phrase, in a way, so elegant and so piercing, makes you so sad. Who hasn't known chronic angers in a house?

Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well.

also polished my good shoes would not be quite as good:

and polished my good shoes as well.

The homeliness of good shoes and the slight formality of as well, the reader feels, I'm in good hands, I'm being guided by an expert who has an emotion and understands the emotion and how to give it to me.

What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?

Bless him.

- Excerpted from interview with US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.

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