Those Winter Sundays

I looked up the meaning of the word "Office" on Wiktionary. I think the one that is being used in this case happens to be the only obsolete meaning: a task that one feels obliged to do. Using obsolete definitions of words is against the rules, Mr. Robert Hayden, even if you were born almost 100 years ago. Anyway, this poem made me a little sad....The dad seems like quite the lovely chap, warming up the house for the whole family and polishing shoes and whatnot. However, the son/speaker of the poem doesn't really care for him all too much. He speaks to him indifferently and doesn't really like him. There are pretty much two explanations for this. On the one hand, maybe the father did all these things because they were offices, a task he feels obliged to do, but that was the only reason why he did it, not out of love, but obligation, and therefore the son feels as though the father doesn't love him. The other (and I personally think more likely) is that the father was unable to show him direct love, like spending time with him and cutting the crust off his PB&J sandwiches, simply because he was off "driving out the cold," which I think represents the hard manual labor that the father had to do every day to make a living for his family. The son wasn't able to recognize this as love because it took place far away from him. However, looking back on it later in life (because the poem is in past tense, see?), as an adult, he's able to recognize it for love.

This is how people kept from losing digits to frostbite before central heating was invented