This poem may be short, but it is filled with a lot of meaning. When beginning the poem, the reader immediately finds out that the father is the focus of the poem as he speaks of him waking up early on Sundays. In the next few lines, the speaker uses alliteration to display the fathers pain he went through when he says “then with cracked hands that ached/ from labor in the weekday weather made/ banked fires blaze” (******). He uses these words cold, cracked, and ached to enhance the discomfort his father was willing to go through for his family: like building a comfortable environment for them before they woke. He woke up on Sunday, the day of rest, to do this for his family in this harsh weather. There is pure sacrifice seen in just these
