Born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan, Robert Hayden (1913–1980) attended Detroit City College (now Wayne State University) before studying under W. H. Auden (p. 1169) in the graduate English program at the University of Michigan. In 1976, Hayden was appointed consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a post that was the forerunner of poet laureate. His first volume, Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), took its voice from the Harlem Renaissance.

Those Winter Sundays

Hayden’s 1962 collection, A Ballad of Remembrance, includes his most famous poem, “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

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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,

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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?

(1962)