Those Winter Sundays

1. Why isn’t the father’s point of view ever shared in this poem? How would the poem be different if it included his perspective? What would be gained, and what would be lost? Can we infer some things about how he thinks and feels even though his voice isn’t in the poem?

2. There are numerous descriptors of coldness in this poem: “blueblack cold,” “cold splintering, breaking,” etc. How does that coldness emphasize or illuminate the poem’s theme about quiet acts of love? Consider the use of the word “austere” in the poem’s final line. What does it connote? How does it connect to the coldness of the poem?

3. The poem does not indicate whether the speaker, now grown, ever had a chance to share his belated understanding of his father’s act of love with the father himself. Using the text of the poem to make an inference, what do you think happened: did the speaker talk with his father, or did his father die before he had a chance? How might the poem change if we knew this information?