deliberations -- deeply thoughtful, philosophical ponderings -- about traveling through life and encountering troubling decisions, then asking questions vis-a-vis those decisions. Frost's "The Road Not Taken" turns out to be the road that was taken, although the speaker assures the reader that it was a tough decision. And in Rossetti's "Uphill" the speaker is unsure of the future but must keep traveling even though at the end of the

Winter Sundays," Robert Hayden memorializes his working class father in an emotionally powerful poem. The speaker reflects on the inability of his working class father to demonstrate love and affection in ways that a young child might have preferred, instead laboring his life away to the extent that resting on Sundays is barely possible. The poem is set on Sunday so that the speaker can reflect fully on how working

Called a “beautiful parental love poem” (Zandy vii) and “a meditation on the fraught love between fathers and sons,” (“Those Winter Sundays” 1) Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” captures the conflict between the American Dream and the Great Depression. Hayden’s poem is brief and to the point, its imagery straightforward rather than cloaked in symbolism. As such, the poem reveals itself to the reader and remains dedicated to revealing

The "blueblack cold" of a winter morning suggests the touch of cold and the sight of blue frost in the darkness. The "cracked hands" of the father who labors for his living appeals to a sense of cold, harsh touch. The son can "hear the cold splintering" and feel the "banked fires blaze," a contrast of the cold sound of ice and the warm crackling fire, and the contrasting

Thus while the father is meant to be resting from a difficult work week, he is instead caring for his family. It is important to note the two places in the poem where the reader can see that the narrator has the benefit of hindsight in evaluating his father's good deeds. The first is at the end of the first stanza, where the narrator states "No one ever thanked him"

E.E. cummings's "she being Brand/-new" appears to be, at its surface, a poem about a man taking his car for a spin and learning the nuances of his new vehicle. The imagery and descriptions cummings uses allows the reader to understand the various things that need to be broken in. The poem's narrator freely admits the car was "consequently a little stiff," which can be further seen in how the