"Those Winter Sundays"

After reading this poem, a reader can easily tell the tone of the piece. Through words like "cracked hands" (3) and "blueblack cold" (2), the tone is one of harshness and working. The narrator of this poem grew up in a household of "chronic angers" (9). The father obviously worked hard, but no one thanked him. It seems like the father cared for his children but maybe had some sort of problem with dealing with them since they were slow to rise in the mornings. He kept his relationships distant. The narrator seems to be putting pain, anger, and maybe being regretful in this poem as well. Pain (maybe mental pain) for dealing with everything his father put him through. Anger towards his father. Being regretful for not caring about anything nice the father did, like shine his shoes or make the house warm in the morning. The poem ends with the rhetorical question "What did I know...?" At the time, the narrator did not realize what the father was actually doing for him.