Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays"

When I create my Hands on Stanzas syllabi for the year, I start by identifying certain dates around which I might be able to design a lesson plan -- holidays, of course, but also birthdays, remembrances, daylight savings time beginning or ending, and sometimes even more tenuous ephemera -- whatever works as a jumping off point for a particular idea. I had earlier noted December 21st as the official start of winter, and while I've previously done lessons that were explicitly winter-related (such as on Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man"), going through my brainstormed list of possible poems to use for the year, Robert Hayden's brilliant 'American' sonnet, "Those Winter Sundays" struck me as ideal for the seasonal theme, as well as for rounding out the halfway point of my residency.

Like James Wright's poem from the week prior, Hayden's has an emotional potency that I think makes it ideal for young people. My students, for example, needed little prodding to make the connection between the father's unsung efforts on his family's behalf, and their wanton disappreciation of them. (We also talked about possible meanings of "the chronic angers of that house." I know from Hayden's bio about his contentious upbringing, but rather than telegraphing that information to students I am more prone to ask them what the line might mean, based on what we have already deciphered in reading the poem closely.) I also thought here was an ideal situation where I could stealthily introduce the concept of a sonnet to students, without taking them down a perhaps precarious pentametrist path.

For their writing idea, I gave students the sonnet's limitation of fourteen lines, and encouraged using more than a single stanza. (Many, in turn, emulated Hayden's three stanzas, but that's fine; prompting said emulation is another stealth method for teaching basic construction tenets of poetry composition.) I said that family should be the (perhaps loose) theme of their poems. Finally, I told them that their poems needed to be set during winter, but asked that they not use the word winter in the poem itself -- they could describe winter weather, or other facets of wintertime, or incorporate details about winter instead. (I did allow the use of 'winter' in the titles of those who asked.)

Here are poems from my three 5th grade classes at Shields. Enjoy!