My Papa’s Waltz - response PDF

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My Papa’s Waltz

“My Papa’s Waltz”, by Theodore Roethke, is a poem about a small child and his alcoholic father. The poem is being told from the child's’ perspective on what is his experience with his father has been in a way of a romantic dance. The narrator is not looking at this situation as a bad thing, he prettifies it by referring to it as a waltz with his father. The language and imagery in this poem are unique. The poet combined dancing and violence together. The child describes his father as a loving, caring man who also is an alcoholic, abusive father as we can see in the first stanza“The whiskey on your breath / could make a small boy dizzy / but i hung on like death”. Later in the poem, we see the child does not refer to the relationship as waltzing but instead calls it a romp between them “We romped until the pans..”. The poet is trying to show us that it is a love relationship between the father and the son but it also points to terror and dominance shown by the father towards his son. The second image to the poem is physical violence when the poet said “The hand that held my wrist \ Was battered on one knuckle ” this indicates that the father is holding his son's hand to guide him in the twirl, which refers to the beginning of a beating. The second image was used by the poet to show that physical violence occurred between the father and the son as it was scary and hard on him “Such waltzing was not easy”. “We romped until the pans / Slid from the kitchen shelf ” the poet shows us the beatings were hard on him that the pans slid from the shelf and blames his mother for not stopping or flinching when his father was beating him “My

mother’s countenance / Could not unfrown itself”. The poet shows us that he does not hate his father for hitting him “then waltzed me off to bed / Still clinging to your shirt” but shows us that he loves and appreciates him. In the first stanza and the fourth stanza he mentions how he clinged to his shirt and hung on like death to his father, this means that the poet loved and spent most of his childhood period with his father....