"Those Winter Sundays"-Robert Hayden

"What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?" (Hayden, 782)

     This final line of Robert Hayden's poem Those Winter Sundays suggests regret on the speakers behalf.  The rest of a poem is a description of the actions of a father and his child's actions on cold Sunday mornings.  The father fought the cold air.  He would even wait to wake his child up until the air had warmed.  All of this, he did without gratification.  The child's treatment of his father paralleled the weather conditions outside: cold.  The end of the poem shows that the child was never able to thank his father.  The now-grown child's understanding of how the different ways in which love could be defined developed too late.  He did not know that keeping his son warm was the father's outward manifestation of love for his son.  Now that he has grasped that love has more than one way of presenting itself, the child regrets never outwardly expressing his love for the father.