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Pretty How Town

 

            The poem "Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town" by E. Cummings is a poem based on two people who live in a town where love is unknown and not spoken of . The two are the only people in "Pretty How Town" that can feel love, but they speak of it. In "Those Winter Sundays", by Robert Hayden, Hayden captures love as one possible theme. Not love as in romance or beauty, but an unmentioned love that can never be spoken in any language; the loves between a father and his son. In the first stanza the reader automatically can paint a picture in his or her own head a possible image Hayden wants to get across. For example, "Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold" paints a vivid picture (1-2). Blue and black can both be possible symbols of death and coldness or possibly water to the reader. Early in the morning when the sky is still a majestic dark blue color the ocean appears to be a black abyss. Hayden continues to describe "father's" aching hands from labor in the weekday weather (3). I believe that Hayden is portraying an older aged man who supports his family as a fisherman. This explains why the narrator says "Sundays too my father got up early", a fisherman has to get early to beat out any other competitors (1-2). The line the starts the theme of the poem is the last line of the first stanza; "no one ever thanked him" (5). Unmentioned love can be the deepest type of love. It is love that can exist deeper in the heart and mind than any other type. "Father" does not need to hear I love you or thanks, he can feel it in the atmosphere around him. It is an unexplained love. The second stanza goes into further detail of the love of "father." The narrator speaks of how "father" drives out the cold early in the morning before the rest of the family awakens. "Father" wakes in the cold so that he can make the house comfortable for everyone else. The narrator says, "I would rise and dress fearing the chronic angers" (9).


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