On winter nights before going to bed I feed the wood stove and walk the dog. It’s a ritual I enjoy because whether my walk is starlit or moonlit or darkened with a hood of clouds, I can count on fresh air, a puff of wood smoke and the profound sense of my connection to all of humanity.
You might not think the path I walk at night a likely setting for such a thought — the only visible houses just winking lights on a hillside across the valley — but the imagination is a bag of astounding tricks. This particular night I conjure a poem 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 rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I’d 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?
I first encountered this poem as a young man, and through the years it has spoken to me in different ways. Only rarely do I identify with the father, even on winter days when keeping the fire going is my office. My heart is with the son because there are so many things I never said to my father, who now has been dead for nearly a quarter-century.
I love this poem for its imagery, for its stark truth, and for its avoidance of sentimentality. There are hints of discord and of poverty in this chilly house, but they seem immaterial next to a father’s sense of duty and a son’s sense of shame for all he took for granted as a boy. Written differently, this could be a poem about a father’s self-pity and his despair over a lifetime of labor and a hungry family to feed. And because Robert Hayden was black, the poem could have been about race.
These days we call February Black History Month. It’s a time to celebrate the contributions of African Americans to our nation’s history and culture, and each year because we are forgetful, we have to relearn the truism that Black History is American History. Robert Hayden, who died in 1980, was the first African American to be recognized as our national poet laureate. But in the 1960s, Hayden was scorned by some of the poets and intellectuals of his race for his insistence that he wanted to be known as an American poet, not as a black one.
The argument that an artist must represent his race, gender or sexual orientation is delicate; it comes from repression, from the fight for recognition in a culture where a white and male majority takes its own recognition for granted. Some feminists make the same demand of women writers, as do some leaders of the LGBTQ movement of theirs.
The truth is that Robert Hayden wrote many poems about race and African American experience. Middle Passage and Frederick Douglass are two of them, the former a fevered nightmare about the slave trade and the Amistad mutiny, the latter a paean to the great abolitionist crusader. Hayden’s insistence that he be known as an American poet is a version of the idea we hear each February, that African American achievement is so deeply woven into the nation’s history that every month should be Black History Month.
My conjuring of Those Winter Sundays is spurred by the starry night and the smell of wood smoke, but soon I’m deep in my own consciousness where I can do what I like with Hayden’s poem. I leave the perspective of the son, leave his guilt and shame, and enter the body of the father and feel … peace. His life is hard, but his house is quiet, and for a short moment as he stirs the coals and adds wood, he has some control over his fate. Before everyone wakes, before the house stirs, before the world outside the walls of the house begins to move, he observes the ritual of warming his house, and it centers him in his universe. As a father, I identify.
But soon I’m back in the son’s skin — this is how great literature works, by giving a reader the freedom to imagine — neither black nor poor nor with “chronic angers” to fear inside my house, but plenty of them in our nation and world. At this stage of my life some of my fear is metaphysical. Robert Hayden, the American poet who also was black, is responsible for this journey of mine with words he wrote more than half a century ago.
Those Winter Sundays is reprinted from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden by Robert Hayden, copyright 1985 by Erma Hayden. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. All rights reserved. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. More information at https://wwnorton.com. Copies through norwichbookstore.com or your favorite bookseller. Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford.