“Those Winter Sundays” is a love poem. It is a poem about familial love and fatherly love, but it is also about the concept of love. The poem defines fatherly love as “austere and lonely” (Line 14), suggesting true love is unconditional and giving. It asks nothing in return. It is a service.

Ancient Greeks and biblical scholars call this kind of love agape, and it is often thought of as godly love. The father in the poem—much like the Father in Christian mythology—acts with agape, and the son in the poem—much like humans in the Bible—does not appreciate that love.

The agape relationship between the father and son in the poem is not accidental. As noted earlier in this guide, the poem uses religious imagery to convey the power of the relationship and the impact the father’s actions had on the speaker.

The poem conveys the father’s agape love by using warmth and cold. In the first stanza, the father awakes into “the blueblack cold” (Line 2). “Blueblack” both describes the sky at an early winter hour and provides a description of cold through synesthesia—a poetic device where an author uses one sense to describe another sense. In this case, the speaker describes the physical sensation of cold with the visual imagery of color.