a sonnet in "free verse"
There is no regular rhyme scheme but there is a heavy use of sonic echos at the ends of lines: "cold" & "ached" (hard 'c' followed by 'd'); "dress" &"house" (with their heavy ending consonant 's'); "call" &"cold" reach across stanzas (hard 'c' followed by an 'l'). There are also a profusion of internal rhymes/echos.
The poem may not seem to have a sonnet's stanzaic structure. Rhetorically, however, lines 1-5 are the problem; 6-9 the complication; and 10-12 resolve the scene. There is still a final couplet within that third stanza, and one which reflects on all that has come before while transforming it emotionally.
The poem has no regular meter; it opens with two pentameter lines, and the second is iambic pentameter, but it quickly undercuts that in the third line. Why might Hayden have decided to invoke & then cast aside the sonnet's metrical pattern?
This is a sonnet because it is 14 lines; fulfills the rhetorical structure of the sonnet; and thematically it continues the tradition of the love poem, though in a familial vein.
Robert Hayden
Born in 1913, Hayden grew up in a destitute African American section of Detroit known as Paradise Valley. Poetic form was always important to him.Technique, he once said, enables discovery and definition in a poem, and it provides a way of "solving the unknowns."
Then there’s what the poem defines, unspoken love. It begins with the father toward the son, when he makes the fire. Then, the unspoken love is returned, when the adult son asks, "What did I know, what did I know...?" The tone of that repetition—more statement than question—cuts from indifference to guilt to admiration. It’s a fast moment in the poem that blossoms into the last word, "offices," a metaphor that expresses the endurance required of long-term love, of manual labor, and of the official fatherly role.
Yet it all begins with that quiet, understated opening line ("Sundays, too, my father got up early"), which defines Hayden’s initial memory, as well as bringing to mind the other unmentioned six days of the week—and for how many years?—when the father began each day in the cold darkness, to warm up the home for his still-dreaming child.
Daniel biespiel
on "Those Winter Sundays"
"Those Winter Sundays" is Hayden's heart-wrenching domestic masterpiece, and very much a poem of discovery and definition.
What it discovers is a synchronicity of sound that embodies the poem’s spirit of reconciliation. Listen to the K sounds: blueblack, cracked, ached, weekday, banked, thanked, wake, breaking, call, chronic. That percussive, consonant-cooked vocabulary is like a melodic map into how to read the poem, linking the fire, the season, the father, and his son.
The Contemporary Sonnet
Rebecca Dunham
Created on July 2, 2024
Start designing with a free template
Discover more than 1500 professional designs like these:
View
Interactive Image with Information
View
Interactive Human Body Image
View
Interactive Artwork Image
View
Interactive Product Image
View
Essential Square Interactive Image
View
Akihabara Vertical Interactive Image
View
Interactive Nature Image
Explore all templates
Transcript
a sonnet in "free verse"
There is no regular rhyme scheme but there is a heavy use of sonic echos at the ends of lines: "cold" & "ached" (hard 'c' followed by 'd'); "dress" &"house" (with their heavy ending consonant 's'); "call" &"cold" reach across stanzas (hard 'c' followed by an 'l'). There are also a profusion of internal rhymes/echos.
The poem may not seem to have a sonnet's stanzaic structure. Rhetorically, however, lines 1-5 are the problem; 6-9 the complication; and 10-12 resolve the scene. There is still a final couplet within that third stanza, and one which reflects on all that has come before while transforming it emotionally.
The poem has no regular meter; it opens with two pentameter lines, and the second is iambic pentameter, but it quickly undercuts that in the third line. Why might Hayden have decided to invoke & then cast aside the sonnet's metrical pattern?
This is a sonnet because it is 14 lines; fulfills the rhetorical structure of the sonnet; and thematically it continues the tradition of the love poem, though in a familial vein.
Robert Hayden
Born in 1913, Hayden grew up in a destitute African American section of Detroit known as Paradise Valley. Poetic form was always important to him.Technique, he once said, enables discovery and definition in a poem, and it provides a way of "solving the unknowns."
Then there’s what the poem defines, unspoken love. It begins with the father toward the son, when he makes the fire. Then, the unspoken love is returned, when the adult son asks, "What did I know, what did I know...?" The tone of that repetition—more statement than question—cuts from indifference to guilt to admiration. It’s a fast moment in the poem that blossoms into the last word, "offices," a metaphor that expresses the endurance required of long-term love, of manual labor, and of the official fatherly role. Yet it all begins with that quiet, understated opening line ("Sundays, too, my father got up early"), which defines Hayden’s initial memory, as well as bringing to mind the other unmentioned six days of the week—and for how many years?—when the father began each day in the cold darkness, to warm up the home for his still-dreaming child.
Daniel biespiel
on "Those Winter Sundays"
"Those Winter Sundays" is Hayden's heart-wrenching domestic masterpiece, and very much a poem of discovery and definition. What it discovers is a synchronicity of sound that embodies the poem’s spirit of reconciliation. Listen to the K sounds: blueblack, cracked, ached, weekday, banked, thanked, wake, breaking, call, chronic. That percussive, consonant-cooked vocabulary is like a melodic map into how to read the poem, linking the fire, the season, the father, and his son.