[george mason university]

Step 2.7: Repetition
November 9th, 2009


In Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” the repetition in the penultimate line (”What did I know, what did I know?” goes a long way in giving the poem its rueful, mysterious, reflective tone. Write a poem in whose tone or sense hinges on repetition in some way.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback 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?

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