Paper Edit

Eng101

Nov.8 2018

Poetry Elements

The poem "Those Winter Sundays," is a poem which talks mainly about memory. It is a domestic setting where the speaker recalls the activities of a father in every Sunday where he rises early to make fire dutifully and also polish the shows for his son. The author is Robert Hayden who was brought up by foster parents due to the bust of his mother and father. This actions inspired him to attempt and recapture some parts of his traumatic childhood in the form of a poem. It is worth noting that the poem talks mainly about the suffering experienced by his father every Sundays in the winter. In this study, the poetry elements which will be examined are the Alliteration, anaphora, assonance, metaphor, and synesthesia.

The alliteration has been used in the poem by words such as "blueback" and the "banked fire blaze" which has been used to repeat the same letter in line with an intention of providing the best example of alliteration. The letter B has explicitly been repeated in the sentence so that it can create the magic of words. In addition, anaphora in line 13 has been used is the repetition of the phrase which creates another figure of speech. In this line, the poet asked himself the questions that he did know what he knows which in essence the repetition indicates his naivety during his childhood and not understanding the sacrifice of his father.

The element of assonance as well has been applied in the poet. The repetition of the vowel sounds particularly had been used in the poem in some lines such as the ‘from labor in the weekday weather made’ together with the, ‘and slowly I would rise and dress’ to denote the color of resonance on the poem. The use of assonance helps in understanding particular conditions which took place in the poem and therefore helps the audience to create an imagery of the environment where the activities took place.

Consequently, the poet has used metaphor and synesthesia. The line ‘I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking’ is a metaphor and the word cold is depicted to be a comparison of a solid thing which have the ability to break and to splinter. In this regards, the poet depicts the hardness of the cold morning. Synthesis as well has been used in the form of colors of blue and black which is intended to show the intensity of the dark and also of the snowy morning. The blue-black is used to indicate a hidden meaning of the chilled Sunday morning.

In summing up, it can be depicted that the poet has used a lot of elements. These include the alliteration has been used in the poem by words such as "blueback" and the "banked fire blaze" which has been used to repeat the same letter in line with an intention of providing the best example of alliteration. Additionally, the element of assonance as well has been applied in the poet. The repetition of the vowel sounds particularly had been used in the poem in some lines such as the ‘from labor in the weekday weather made’ together with the, ‘and slowly I would rise and dress’ to denote the color of resonance on the poem. Use of assonance helps in understanding particular conditions which took place in the poem and therefore helps the audience to create an imagery of the environment where the activities took place.

Work Cited

Welsch, Kathleen A. Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and Their Working-Class Parents. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 2005. Print.