Those Winter Sundays

Though “Those Winter Sundays” does not follow a set rhythm or use a rhyme scheme, it does use other poetic conventions to create rhythm and strong sounds. The most prominent of these devices are alliteration (the repeated use of consonant sounds) and assonance (the repeated use of vowel sounds).

Critics usually note the poem’s alliteration as one of its strongest elements because Hayden uses repeating sounds to amplify the mood of the poem. He continually repeats the strong c and k sounds to create a harsh, cold feeling. The first stanza exemplifies this with the words clothes, black, cold, cracked, ached, week, banked, and thanked. He continues this in stanza two with wake, cold, breaking, call, and chronic. And in the final stanza, he again repeats the sounds with words like speaking and cold, though as the poem moves into its moment of reflection and regret, Hayden drops the harsh sounds of childhood.

Other repeated sounds are l, o, and a. The first stanza uses most of these sounds, including “clothes/cold” (Line 2), “labor/weekday/made” (Line 4), and “banked/thanked” (Line 5).