Retrospection of Poems

Retrospection in the following poems "Those Winter Days" and "Unknown Citizen"



Retrospection in the following poems "Those Winter Days" and "Unknown Citizen"

Retrospection “Those Winter Days”

Robert Hayden's tribute to his foster father demonstrates the effectiveness of understatement, brevity and artful imagery. Mingled with respectful memories of the father figure is his realization of the ingratitude that commonly accompanies youth. In line one the common three-lettered word "too" is packed with meaning. Sunday is the day of rest. A working man should be able to sleep later than on working days. But such was not the case for the man the poet called father. He rose early and set about the tasks of making the arising of the rest of his family less uncomfortable than it had been for himself. The key images are of cold and heat, and they are rendered visually and audibly. In line two, "blue-black cold" recalls the blue-bottle ice of winter streets in the ghetto neighborhood of Detroit where the poet spent his boyhood. That coldness expressed more than the room temperature that the father was attempting to ameliorate by stirring banked fires into flame. Such chill also describes the presumptuous and ungrateful attitude of the rest of the household, none of whom ever thanked the man for his efforts on their behalf. The past tense of the poem shows that a regretful realization of blind ingratitude has since dawned on the speaker. His backward look at his father is belatedly warm and appreciative.

In stanza two the words "cold, splintering breaking" reinforce the image of the earlier "blueblack" ice that was both climatic and situational. "Splintering" makes the image audible and visual as well as tactile. The "chronic angers" bespeak the unhappiness of the domestic situation and an emotional heat or chill that brings no ...