Answer: The repeated f in "fed the furnace for forty years" creates a breathy, rhythmic sound like bellows or a roaring fire, and suggests endless repetition. The furnace is personified with an "open mouth" that must be fed, making it seem like a hungry creature, and the iron that "bled orange" makes the metal seem alive and wounded.

Answer: Clang and Hiss imitate the sounds of hammering and hot metal meeting water, and the hard h and plosive sounds in "hammer's hard reply" are harsh and percussive. The caesuras break the line into jolts, like hammer blows, immersing the reader in the noisy, physical workplace.

Answer: Sibilance links soot and silence, joining the physical dirt of the job to his emotional quietness, as if silence were another substance clinging to him. The soft s sounds contrast with the loud foundry, suggesting he brought none of its noise, or his feelings, home.

Answer: The caesura after "He never spoke of the heat" creates a pause that stresses his silence. Then the enjambment carries the rare moment of speech across the line break, so the reader leans forward, waiting, just as the speaker must have waited for him to speak.

Answer: Literally, metal can ring or vibrate under stress. Metaphorically, it suggests that things, and people, show signs of strain before they fail. It may hint that the grandfather endured hardship silently, and it foreshadows his own decline in the final stanza.

Answer: Unrhymed tercets give a steady, controlled structure, like measured work, without the neatness or musical lightness of rhyme. Three-line units also feel slightly unbalanced and incomplete, which suits a poem about loss, silence and things left unsaid.

Answer: In stanza 1 his hands are implied in the hard work of heaving coke and feeding the furnace, and in line 14 they once "bent bright iron", a plosive image of strength. In the final stanza they are "cool now, and light", soft words suggesting age and frailty, yet they still "hum", implying a lasting energy and the persistence of memory.

Model answer: The poet uses a deliberate movement from harsh to soft sound, held within the controlled form of unrhymed tercets, to explore how the past fades and yet continues to resonate. The opening stanza's alliteration in "fed the furnace for forty years" creates a breathy, repetitive rhythm that evokes both the roar of the fire and the relentless decades of toil, while the personified furnace with its "open mouth" becomes a hungry creature the grandfather must serve. In the second stanza, onomatopoeia and caesura combine in "Clang. Hiss.", the abrupt stops breaking the line into jolts like hammer blows, and the plosive h of "hammer's hard reply" makes the reader feel the foundry's violence. Yet sibilance quietly undercuts this noise in "slick with soot and silence", fusing the physical grime of the job with an emotional reticence that the grandfather carries home. The central stanza, built around a rare moment of speech carried by enjambment, offers the metaphor that "the metal sang before it broke", hinting at strain endured in silence. The fourth stanza marks a decisive shift: the foundry is now "glass and glossy balconies", and the soft, sibilant "slides past slow and soft" replaces industrial din with a gentle, maternal image of the river smoothing stones. This softness carries into the final hospital scene, where the hands that once "bent bright iron", a burst of plosives, are now "cool" and "light". However, the poem resists simple loss, as the final word "hum" echoes the singing metal and suggests that the energy of the grandfather's working life persists in memory. In this way, the poet's orchestration of sound across the poem's steady tercets enacts the very process it describes: the noise of the past fading, but never entirely falling silent.