Today we began working on connotations by looking at Robert Hayden’s excellent poem “Those Winter Sundays.” After defining connotations through a modified form of inductive reasoning,

we looked at the poem. 

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?

During the first step, in which everyone annotates the poem for unknown or unfamiliar words, everyone of course didn’t know what “chronic” and “austere” meant, and everyone marked “blueblack” even though they probably couldn’t imagine it meaning anything other than what it seemed to mean.

Afterward, we compared the poem to a rewritten version, in which the following changes were made:

• “Sundays too my father got up early” was changed to “My father got up early on Sundays
• “Blueblack” was eliminated
• “Banked fires blaze” was transformed into “stove fires grow”
• “Chronic” was changed to “constant”
• “What did I know, what did I know” was changed to “What did I know at that moment”
• “Austere” was converted into “stern”
• “Offices” became “promises”

Tomorrow, we’ll be looking more deeply into the poem to see just what role connotations play.