By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Those Winter Sundays’ is a 1962 poem by the American poet and essayist Robert Hayden (1913-80). It is probably his most widely anthologised and frequently studied poem, and arose from Hayden’s own conflicted feelings towards his foster father.
You can read ‘Those Winter Sundays’ here (the poem takes around one minute to read) before reading on to our summary and analysis of Hayden’s poem below.