Those Winter Sundays

Those Winter Sundays - Robert Hayden

From the beginning, mostly indicated by the chilled setting, the narrator has some reservations about his father and his indicated gruff manner. They seem to be strangers living in the same home, as the son describes, he was "speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold," (Hayden, 782). But in the larger sense, the narrator is exploring the motivations of his father's morning ritual of warming the house before he wakes. Though he describes the furthered distance between them, in the end it is indicated that the narrator understands that his father's motivation is love.