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 sensations of cold and warmth.
The contrast between the physical, particularly the tactile sense of warm and cold, intensifies the sense of thwarted love the father feels for the boy, but cannot really show, except in rising early to make a fire and polish the boy's good shoes.
Figures of speech
Synecdoche: (a single thing that stands for larger meaning) Lighting a fire becomes a synecdoche or stand-in for the man's entire relationship with his son.
Hyperbole: The suggestion "No one ever thanked him" causes the reader to wonder -- Never? Not even the boy's mother? The narrator probably means he cannot ever remember regularly thanking his father, and thus feels guilty. The "cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather," is also hyperbolic as the man's hands are unlikely to still be aching from regular works, although this shows that he works for a living at manual labor.
Metaphor: the metaphor of the cold winter house lit by a warm fire is a metaphor for the coldness of the son and the father's relationship, only briefly warmed by the fire.
Sound
Alliteration: "blueblack," "weekday weather," "banked fires blaze"
Assonance: "cracked hands," "warm, he'd call," "weekday...banked...thanked"
Consonance: "cold," "chronic" "cracked" "ached" (c-sounds)
Rhyme Scheme: The poem is unrhymed, and does not have a consistent syllable count for every line like a sonnet, although it is fourteen lines and has a kind of sonnet-like resolution at the end of the poem. The poem begins with an image in the first stanza, makes that image more complex in the following stanzas, and then resolves the problem,...
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
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Robert Hayden is set at a time during the cold climates. However, despite the time frame in which the poem was set, the poem is still applicable to situations not properly set in the cold days of living. What the poet, Robert Hayden, points out is that the labor that the narrator's father expends just to be able to make a well made fire to get out the cold
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