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,...

Neither the father nor son is bad or good. The house is cold, emotionally, and often angry. Yet the father feels deeply enough about his son that he rises, without thanks or request, to light the fire to warm the house, so his son can awake to a cozy home. The father also shines his son's good shoes so the son will not have to complete this task himself. The son in the poem only regrets his father's coldness. The speaker, now an adult and looking back upon his early relationship with his father with greater wisdom understands that people are not perfect, and sometimes such physical actions are all that a father can do to show his affection. These methods still feel cold, like offices or rituals, even to the narrator of the present, but now he can at least appreciate them more than he could as a young child. The poem depends on a contrast between cold and warm, and its tone is cold, halting, although it makes use of intense touch and sound images and sensations to convey the parental relationship. The act of lighting a fire becomes a synecdoche for the entire father and son relationship of coldness and warmth.
Works Cited

Austere." Definition from Dictionary. com. [19 May 2006.] http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=austere

Hayden, Robert. "Those Winter Days." Backpack Literature, An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Edited by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia.

Splintering." Definition from Dictonary.com. [19 May 2006.] http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=splintering