♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ELISA NEW: I'm so happy to be here with Vice President Joe Biden to read a poem with me, "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden.

BIDEN: "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?

ANGELA DUCKWORTH: Maybe I am like most readers, who probably is reading this thinking about the author, Robert Hayden, and his father, but immediately, my own childhood and my own father.

COLIN CRISS: Morning after morning, my father would be shoveling the driveway, you know, making these lines back and forth to allow the day to go on, allow the day to begin.

THOMAS BERNDT: My father used to put on the fires in the morning.

I heard him every morning with an axe in the kitchen make kindling.

LINCOLN HAMPTON: My father worked as a skycap.

He got up early every day.

He never talked about that job as something that he wanted to do or that he had aspired to do, but he did it because he knew what was necessary for his family.

MARTIN GREENUP: I had a dad who was... he was a sheep farmer doing really tough, backbreaking work.

The effect of that is sort of austerity, that severity, the harshness.

♪ ♪ ALEXANDER ANDRADE: Getting up early, the hard work and the cracked hands.

My father did have calluses all over his hands, so it does remind me a lot of it, absolutely.

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: I found the poem in high school, and I found the inability to really express love, but the wish to express love was so pulsing and powerful.

IRWIN GOLDEN: I never got to know my father until he got sick.

I know we used to visit him every week.

He lived in Saugus in a nursing home, and I got to know him more.

Like, I never knew his father died at 34 years old.

BIDEN: It's funny how a poem can sort of creep into your soul, you know?

And, you know, and you go, "Oh, okay."

You can feel it, you can picture it.

ALEXANDER: When students come to study African-American poetry with me, I can pretty much guarantee that they've read this poem in high school and, usually, that they have not known that it was written by an African-American poet, which is interesting, because I think that it is a very black poem in important ways that we can talk about.

But I think it also is a poem whose particulars are quite transcendent.

(bell tolling) NEW: The poet Robert Hayden was born in Paradise Valley, one of the poorest black neighborhoods in Detroit.

When two-year-old Hayden's parents separated, he was adopted by neighbors into a household as strict as his first home was turbulent.

This title, "Those Winter Sundays," gathers a lot of memories into one.

It seems like it is alluding to something which must been ritualistic.

(bell tolling) BIDEN: If you start at the first line, "Sundays too my father got up early," I mean, I was raised in a household where my dad worked all the time.

ALEXANDER ANDRADE: He got up at 4:00, and he'd leave the house by 5:00, and he'd have to clean the snow outside.

And then he worked inside mopping floors and scraping chocolate around the machines and stuff.

NEW: Where did he work?

Nabisco.

GOLDEN: My father worked so hard, we didn't see him that often.

He left for work Saturday morning, and came home Sunday morning.

He worked all straight through.

That was the way of life years ago.

And I ended up doing the same thing he did.

ALEXANDER: Here's Robert Hayden growing up in Detroit in the 1920s and '30s.

He's taking us back to the Depression.

And so I think that all of that is in there and under there in these very, very specific details.

NEW: "Aching," "cracked," "blueblack."

In the very sounds, in the sonic patterns of this stanza, we hear the painful, brittle sharpness of Detroit cold.

GREENUP: "Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold."

On the page, it looks quite startling because you have this repetition of the "B" sound.

WOMAN: "Blueblack cold."

MAN: "Blueblack cold."

MAN: "Blueblack cold."

GREENUP: So each syllable is stressed.

WOMAN: "Blueblack cold."

GREENUP: It calls attention to itself.

MAN: "Blueblack cold."

MAN: "Blueblack cold."

GREENUP: It's giving you a visual image to an abstract invisible.

It's a different way to describe the cold.

You know, I've never heard it described with a color.

"Blueblack" to me means bitter, dark, miserable cold.

It is not just dark, but it is, like, a lonely kind of, you could say stillness.

Isn't it extraordinary the way the blue gives it the loneliness?

Yes, exactly.

And then to make blueblack into one word, I mean, it's just... it's, it's, it's really beautiful.

Really, if the poem were just two lines, I think it would still be, like, gorgeous.

But I think, also, you know, "blueblack" is sometimes used to describe skin color-- a very, very dark skin in a black person.

And I think that blues is in there, too.

I really consider that the little clue that lets us understand that later on, we're in a blues space.

♪ ♪ Detroit, in the 1920s and '30s, the blues are everywhere.

I mean, this would have been ambient sound.

♪ ♪ And the song, which would have been a song that Hayden would have heard as a child, "(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue?"

LOUIS ARMSTRONG: ♪ What did I do to be so black and blue?

♪ Do you think black and blue?

Yes, absolutely.

I think black and blue is in there, and the wounds self-inflicted and inflicted by labor and time.

BIDEN: "Then with cracked hands that ached."

Guys' dads worked either in the coal mines or in the salt factory.

Their hands would literally be cracked.

BERNDT: They don't usually wear gloves because they need the feel of the hands, the fingers.

I was a boat builder for many years, so I never wore gloves.

My hands were cracked; I could relate.

GOLDEN: He'd go out in the cold, cold, freezing, come back, bank the fire downstairs, and heat up the house.

CRISS: "Then with cracked hands "that ached from labor and the weekday weather made banked fires blaze."

HAMPTON: It's not our time of comfort where we can go to a thermostat that might automatically pop on at 7:00 in the morning.

Someone has to actually literally get up, make sure there are coals.

GOLDEN: When you bank a fire, it doesn't burn as fast, so it'll last the night.

You know, the heat will come up gradually.

You literally haven't moved from, you know, from the back down forward.

You have to tend to a banked fire, too.

You kind of constantly, you know, keep an eye on it.

But, but it will last much longer than a blazing fire.

DUCKWORTH: "Made" is hanging there at the end of that line, and so, you know, you just linger a little bit, and you're like "made," and then "banked fires blaze."

So there's just a micro-pause, almost, and it gives it just a little... so, his father, I guess is a maker, you know.

And, yeah, you feel it a little more.

GREENUP: "Blueblack cold," "banked fires," "blaze."

The "B" of "banked" with the "blaze."

And it's almost like the response to that "blueblack cold," through what the father has done.

"Banked" has an economic connotation, too.

It made me think about thrift.

And about security, which is obviously what the poem is about, right?

It's about, you know, safety and security and giving.

"No one ever thanked him."

GREENUP: "No one ever thanked him."

BIDEN: "No one ever thanked him."

It was like, well, that's what he's supposed to do.

That's what dads are supposed to do.

BIDEN: What was I going to thank him for?

I mean, why would I do that?

That's just, that's just what's supposed to happen.

I probably could have thanked him a lot more, absolutely.

Um...

But, um...

But I sure as hell respected him.

Not only did he not ever thank his father, but maybe no one else did, either.

And maybe even beyond the family, no one ever thanked him.

I mean, it's a pretty lonely figure that's painted here.

>> Oh, I'm so glad that you had used the word "lonely" for the "blueblack."

I hadn't realized the "loneliness of no one ever thanked him" is already intimated in that "blueblack."

DUCKWORTH: Yeah.

Right, this sort of, you know, if there could be a color of isolation, I guess it would be blueblack.

♪ ♪ CRISS: The speaker of that line-- "No one ever thanked him"-- seems to be the speaker of the rest of the poem, but ages and ages hence.

Someone looking back on this time.

It crystallizes the relationship as one that has developed, and one that has evolved.

You know, he has this different perspective now.

He's looking back and seeing where he made these mistakes.

NEW: "Those Winter Sundays" is a carefully made poem whose form orchestrates its emotional impact.

We are five lines in with a stanza break before the speaker even awakens to his father's labors.

Another four lines, and then a third stanza.

Five lines, for a total of 14.

ALEXANDER: It is a sonnet.

The sonnet form is an amount of poem that lets you do everything, but economically.

So it's a perfect, perfect little box in which you can make the whole world happen.

NEW: This is an irregular sonnet.

It doesn't divide into eight lines-- an octet-- and six lines-- a sestet-- like a Petrarchan sonnet, or into three quatrains and a couplet, like a Shakespearean sonnet.

ALEXANDER: Hayden is playing around with the form, whether consciously or not, because, of course, poets absorb forms that are this fundamental.

The sonnets, this form lets us talk about love.

But for Hayden, it is that refusal to fully enter what that form has been, including in the subject matter.

I mean, this is not about romantic love.

NEW: No.

- It is about love, though.

♪ ♪ CRISS: "I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call."

BIDEN: I picture the heat started to come up through the register, and that frost on the window, it's starting to dissipate a little bit.

And you can lay... you can stick your foot outside the blanket and, you know, the image I have is that because of what dad did early that morning, he's shattering that, that cold.

GREENUP: "The splintering and the breaking," which is a kind of a good thing, I guess, in that the cold is starting to change on account of what the father has done.

But "splintering," "breaking"... (clanging) They're not sort of very positive.

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

"When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress."

GREENUP: There are lots of positive, direct representations of the father doing good.

But the big kind of negative is this word "anger."

The speaker says, "I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house."

One thing I can say as a psychologist, not as a poet or a writer, is that when there is uncertainty or confusion, it makes your attention very sticky.

So the fact that I am not given an explanation for the chronic angers of that house, you know, you come back to that and you, like... you want to know.

(clanging) BERNDT: It's a very complex relationship that I saw.

When you read the fearful, chronic fearfulness in the house.

There's some sort of drama going on in that house.

ALEXANDER: This poem has always appeared with, on the opposite side, "The Whipping."

And "The Whipping" begins, "The old woman across the way is whipping her grandson again."

♪ ♪ GREENUP: For a child to be fearful in his own house, that's shocking, but the way the anger is transferred to the house, there's a, there's a degree of understatement there.

But it only it only heightens that emotion.

BIDEN: I read that as he didn't think where he lived was particularly commodious.

I'm part of a community that is poor, that is... NEW: Yes.

- That is left behind.

When I think of the word "chronic," I think of chronic arthritis.

I think of a chronic condition.

Oh, yeah, chronic is a word associated with disease or with patterns one would break.

ALEXANDER: Yes.

- If one could.

ALEXANDER: Yes, and so I think that there's something also very powerful about poverty, about poverty's effect on the body, about the kind of work that this man has to do, and its effects on his body.

BIDEN: I assumed it meant, "Hey, Dad, I'm sorry, "but I had all these problems and, you know, "I lived in a lousy neighborhood, man.

"It was the toughest neighborhood in Detroit.

"And, Dad, you weren't around.

"And, Dad, the house was a lousy house we lived in.

And, damn, Dad, in the winter it was a bear."

CRISS: There's also the anger of the house itself, when the pipes bang and the frame creaks on itself.

(creaking) BIDEN: "Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well."

There could be ambivalence.

I mean, who doesn't have ambivalence toward their parents?

Like all young kids, we're selfish.

We're, we don't realize what we do to our fathers and mothers or family, for that matter.

You're just interested in your own self being.

♪ ♪ HAMPTON: Discipline may be required in order to accomplish the things that we want to accomplish in life, and this is a parental responsibility to instill that into a child who, in this poem, is resistant to this type of prodding, but must be prodded if it is to succeed in life.

It seems like there's a normal routine on Sunday that the child must feel obliged to follow.

Whatever it is, he seems to want to still retreat to his blanket and his sheet and his corner of the room that he's decided is more comforting.

♪ ♪ GREENUP: It stands out that the word "cold" appears in every stanza.

And that cold changes.

It begins as "blueblack cold."

In the second stanza, the cold's splintering, breaking.

Something's starting to change.

And by the third stanza, the cold has been driven out.

So this gives a kind of continuity to the poem, but it also gives us a sense of change.

BERNDT: The temperature kind of changes, and he kind of reflects, you know, from when he was a young child and he didn't thank his father for all the things that he did, you know.

At the end, he reflects on the father even polishing his shoes, probably to go to Sunday service, I imagine.

NEW: The father will perform a very humble act of service.

That goes back, you know, to the Bible and otherwise, right?

I mean, there's something, you know, the ultimate act of humility is to bow down and touch someone's feet or to wash their feet, in this case, you know, polishing shoes.

It's, like, the father puts himself below the son.

I can picture that father polishing his son's shoes as a way of showing how much he loved him.

I mean, he loved him.

There was not ever any doubt that we felt that we were loved, even though my father never spoke the words.

It was more expressed with the way they acted and what they did for you, that there was no doubt that there was love there.

HAMPTON: "What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?"

"Of love's austere and lonely offices."

"Offices."

That's part of... NEW: You're an officeholder.

- No, no... NEW: What is... how should we read that?

- Well, I think that he views being a father like an office, like it is a responsibility.

"You chose this.

"You chose to have me.

This is a responsibility that you have."

And... but it's lonely.

It's sometimes very tough having to fulfill the functions of that office, of fatherhood.

And, of course, offices in the sense of... You know, it takes us right back to Sundays, right?

In the sense of sort of religious offices.

I mean, it's a poem that is a... NEW: Right, it's about ritual.

Ritual and about, I think, religious meditation in the absence of church.

(church bell tolling) GREENUP: But here, it's love's offices.

It's as though love is performing this service, this duty.

DUCKWORTH: Why would you describe love as an obligation that is austere, without decoration, without comfort, and lonely?

And, you know, of course, that ties the whole poem together because, like, that is his father's life.

In some ways, our love for another person can be lonely, particularly the love between parents and children.

♪ ♪ CRISS: "What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?"

NEW: I was wondering about the repetition, "What did I know?"

- I think it's, like, really... "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa," you know?

"I am sorry, I am sorry, I am heartily sorry."

Like, "God, what did I know?"

CRISS: This person has been thinking about their father and coming to understand their father's love for them.

But that's almost all thought to get to that point.

And this moment of repetition is a moment of pure emotion.

"What did I know, what did I know?"

I mean, you know, when we say things twice it's often because, you know, we're just overflowing with emotion.

♪ ♪ ALEXANDER: That's the blues at the end-- "What did I know, what did I know?"

It has to be repeated.

It's a lament.

You know, it's got that... and that repetition, borrowed from the blues, that enables you, also, to take a story that is a personal story and make it universal.

♪ ♪ The blues is a form that allows us to transcend, but it is not a triumphal form.

Part of its real accomplishment that is very much in an African-American tradition is, how do you take received forms, forms that, you know, come from Europe, have been around as long as the sonnet, and turn them and infuse them with the sounds and structures and forms of African-American culture?

And in a country where we are all hybrids, right?

Where heterogeneity is what defines us, and so what could be more natural than writing the English sonnet, Shakespeare sonnet, in the blues?

ALEXANDER: To sing it in that way is, I think, what so powerfully turns and then resolves the poem, although we're left with... the resolution is the question.

The resolution is the eternal generational, you know... NEW: I could not have imagined what my parents...

I couldn't have imagined.

I couldn't have imagined.

NEW: Where does the emotion in these last two lines come from?

- I think it comes from, you know, realization, maturation, having to deal with the things your dad dealt with as an adult.

Now you are an adult.

Yes.

BIDEN: Don't you find, as a mother, you look back, and you say to yourself sometimes, "How did my mom do that?"

Or, "How did my dad do that?"

Because I'm trying to do it right now.

The development of understanding is, you know, the happy story of humanity.

Most people do develop insight and empathy, appreciation over their life course.

We do get better in that sense.

Our character does develop.

And maybe this is also why the poem must resonate with so many people.

GOLDEN: To this day, I feel sorry I didn't get to know my father.

I envy people that still have, you know, relatives alive, and I try to put it in my perspective of my three children.

And it's the same with them.

They're closer to their mother than they are to me because the mother nurtures them and brings them up, where the father goes out for a living.

So it's kind of hard.

ALEXANDER: The story that's told about Hayden's recording this poem when he was the poet laureate is that this was a poem that he could not finish reading because he always broke down.

- Because he cracked.

- Yeah.

Because he cracked, exactly.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪