In this poem, the speaker contrasts his childish memories and perceptions of his father with his adult consciousness of the sacrifices his father made for him. The repeated "What did I know, what did I know" near the poem's end emphasizes his adult anguish at how little he appreciated his father's love when he was growing up.

The poem recreates the way his father would get up early in the cold to build the fires in the house. His father would polish his shoes for him and wait for the cold rooms to warm up before he woke up his son.

At the time, the son took these actions for granted. As a child, he was more focused on the "chronic angers" in the house, suggesting that his father had a hard life. As a child, the speaker would speak to his father "indifferently," more attuned to what was wrong with his family's life than the daily sacrifices his father made for him.

Now, as an adult, the son has a different perspective, expressed in a form of verbal hand-wringing over all he didn't appreciate. He was once too young and immature to realize the power of his father's love or the way it expressed itself in "austere and lonely offices" or, in other words, stark and lonely actions.

The poem is seemingly simple, setting out the scene of a father caring for his son's needs on harshly cold winter mornings. However, the poem's complexity emerges from the dual perspectives of the speaker: he is both the child who took the love for granted and the adult who regrets he didn't know enough to understand more clearly how much his father loved him.