Those Winter Sundays

"Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze." - Robert Hayden

I found this poem to be the most insightful, sparking my own thoughts and realizations of how I feel about my own father.  This poem portrays the self-sacrificing duties the speaker's father did everyday.  The father would get up early every morning in the cold and start a fire, allowing for the members of the family to rise from their slumbers a little more enjoyably than he did.  Something else I noticed was Hayden's use of the word "too" in the first line.  This shows that everyday, not just on Sundays, the day for rest, the father would wake up early and help the family the best way he could.  The last two lines of the poem say, "What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?"  Here the speaker is admitting that he took for granted the things his father did for him and his family.  I began to wonder what kinds of things my own father did that I, too, took for granted.