Those Winter Sundays
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“Those Winter Sundays” and “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” both emphasize the idea of love. Love is a feeling many people do not express, however there is always a spiritual way to connect love to the bad and good.
“Those winter sundays” is a poem in which the son express his gratitude for all the hard work his father has done for him. He also expresses the regret he feels for not showing his appreciation towards him. William Haylen uses many literary terms in order to emphasize the feelings and message of the speaker.
Haylen refers to his fathers “cracked hands” in line four. The “cracked hands” are a symbol of hard work. His father worked hard in order to keep his child well maintained. The cracked hands also reveal that the father worked manual labor. Although his hands ached from the cracks and cold weather, he continued to work all week, even early mornings on Sundays.
Personification is another literary term that is used in this poem. Haylen personified “chronic angers of that house” in order to describe the relationship between the father and child. Perhaps the father and child did not share a good relationship but the child always respected him for all the things that his father did for him.
In the poem, Hayden described sounds that help bring out the suffering they both had to deal with, such as the metaphor “I awoke and heard the cold splintering, breaking”. This metaphor is comparing the cold to a solid object that is capable of breaking. The heat that the father generated with the fire broke through the cold that was inside the house.
The theme of this poem is sad and regretful. The child never thanked his father for all the hard work he did in order to keep them well maintain. The father polished his shoes before church on Sunday. He worked manual labor every day in the cold. His father sacrifice a lot.
“Love calls us to the things of this world” is a poem about the reason for life. We awake daily and do things daily because of love. When the soul is freed from the body at night, it is peaceful and pure realm. However, the waking world is full of stress and negative things that occu daily. Using different literary terms, Richard Wilbur was able to contrast the difference between the two parts of love in the world.
Richard Wilbur uses imagery to provide a full understanding of the spiritual idea of love. He describes the spirits fulfilling