Dad, Part 4

What I wrote last week:

April 2011:

This semester I assigned my students to individually present on a single sonnet for 15 minutes. It has turned out surprisingly well—the student presenting chooses a sonnet from our sonnet anthology, leads discussion on fourteen lines of poetry, and then sums it up with an interpretation. If nothing else, the exercise has introduced some wonderful sonnets to us and reminded me of some sonnets that I had forgotten about.

A few weeks ago, a student came to my office wanting to discuss the possibility of presenting on “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. I didn’t recognize the name, but as I began to read it, I instantly remembered how I had read it for Mrs. Marsh’s class when I was a senior. But more than the memory of reading it, I remembered the way it made me feel. Here it is.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices?

I remember feeling like it was saying something that was affectionate and agonizing, something that I didn’t quite understand but that moved me anyway. The poem stayed in my psyche and I subsequently referred to it as “the poem about the father getting up early to warm the house.” I had never looked at it since my senior year in high school, but the “sense” of it remained with me. At any rate, when I read it again in my office with my student, the memory of feeling came back, in part because what it was saying now was like commentary on not understanding it then.

The speaker of the poem thinks about his ignorance of love and regrets it, but he also cherishes what he did not realize then. The tone is affectionate and warm, like the early morning fire, but also mournful and disappointed. I look back on the way I experienced the poem then, and I want to ask my high school self the same question the poet asks himself in the last two lines, only in direct address: “What do you know, what do you know/ Of love’s austere and lonely offices?”

The poem took on extra resonance because I reread it with my student two weeks from the seven-year anniversary of my Dad’s death. My high school senior self didn’t understand much about his Dad’s love, the kind of love that was manifest in exactly this kind of way—the gifts that go unnoticed out of habit. “Sundays too”—that “too” makes the poem. When love can only manifest itself in the quiet, lonely hours where it can only be imagined as requited, it performs the ritual of saving grace as a silent act of recompense.

My dad didn’t mind expressing his affection too much I guess, but he didn’t do so unself-consciously. I think most of us had no issue with the lack of open affection, principally because we were so used to his love’s austere and quiet habits. Besides, as he got older he put down his emotional guard more and more. Still, I look back and continue to ask the question, “What did I know, what did I know?”

After my student left that day, I reread the poem a few times and thought back with mournful affection, wondering how many love sonnets I could write on the anecdotes of dad’s austere and lonely offices. Listing them—driving the paper routes, reading to us in the early morning, listening to my mixtapes—doesn’t do them justice, so a sonnet, the form that perfectly frames love’s intensity, might work. Maybe it is just enough to remember him in those moments, the ones I often didn't see, before I confront the “chronic angers” of the world.