My Papa’s WaltzTheodore Roethke (1908 – 1963)

BACKGROUND ON THE POET• Born in Saginaw, Michigan, Roethke was the son of a

greenhouse owner.• Greenhouses figure prominently in the imagery of his poems.• He graduated magna cum laude from the University of

Michigan in 1929, where he also earned an M.A. in 1936 after graduate study at Harvard. • He taught at several universities, coached two varsity tennis

teams, and settled at the University of Washington in 1947.• Intensely introspective and demanding of himself, Roethke

was renowned as a great teacher, though sometimes incapacitated by an on-going manic-depressive condition.

…

• His collection The Waking: Poems 1933-1953, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. • Other awards include Guggenheim

Fellowships in 1945 and 1950, and a National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1959 for Words for the Wind (1958).

Not about physical abuse!!!

• Roethke had a deep, almost religious respect for his father.• This respect was religious (in a Christian sense) because

Roethke had an admiration for his father’s ability, yet he was fearful of his strength.• According to Malkoff, Roethke once saw his father bring a

couple of poachers to a halt with his rifle and then go and slap their faces for interrupting his work. • "Otto Roethke, a Prussian through and through, was

strong and firm, but his strength was, for his son, a source of both admiration and fear, of comfort and restriction" (Malkoff 4).

…• This fear, combined with the love and awe-inspired

dependency that a son has for his father, comes out clearly in the poem.

TITLE

My Papa’s Waltz• Papa = Father• Waltz = dance

LINE 1 & 2

The whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;

does not portray him as a stumbling drunk

IRONYEmphasizes the irony of line 4.

Playing around

METERSpeaker uses three-syllable and four-syllable patterns in the meter to emphasize the waltz: “The WHISkey on your BREATH / Could MAKE a small boy DIZzy.”

slant rhymes

Violence

Young/literally small

LINE 3 & 4

But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.

IRONY-Speaker’s father presents danger, he “hangs on” for dear life. The word death is thus ironic, it makes the danger of the situation clear.-The waltz should be easy, the speaker is just being swung around by his father. It isn’t easy because their lives together aren’t easy.

ALLITERATIONGentle sound of the repeated “w” contrasts with simile about death in line 3 and with the characterization of the waltz as “not easy.” The alliteration makes the waltz sound natural and tranquil.

SIMILEHe was having fun and did not want to fall off

DICTION (words)More precise ways to describe the dance, a child would not use a more sophisticated vocabulary.

slant rhymes

not "waltzing" in the conventional sense; they are horse-playing

LINE 3 & 4

But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.

SIMILEIntroduces death to emphasize the danger of the situation or the darker side of the “waltz”. Gives the child a power outside of human agency, which is the only way to have power over the father. Death “hangs on” in the sense that it is permanent, and perhaps the child wants to freeze this moment for fear of what will happen if he or she lets go.

SYMBOLSomeone must lead in a waltz - the father’s dominance over his child. It is not the fact that the child is being led, but instead the way the father is leading that makes the dance “not easy.”

LINE 5 & 6

We romped until the pansSlid from the kitchen shelf;

The word romped here is ironic because it makes the waltz sound carefree, yet the effect of this romping is to cause a violent, crashing disruption in their domestic world.

slant rhymes

To play in a happy and noisy way

LINE 7 & 8

My mother's countenanceCould not unfrown itself.

ALLITERATIONThe sharp sound of the repeated “c” gives a hard edge to an otherwise graceful-sounding stanza.

Brief description of the speaker’s mother is a warning, or signal of danger (like the same hard “c” in the parental command “careful!”)

DICTIONSignal a change in the poem: countenance is an unusual word for facial expression, unfrown is a made-up word.- Her disapproval of this scene and her

apparent inability to do anything about it except scowl intensify the danger of the situation.

- There is an audience for the tragedy.

slant rhymes

Could stop frowning if she chose to – angry because her pots and pans were flying around, but was really trying not to laugh at the spectacle of father and son dancing together.

LINE 9 & 10

The hand that held my wristWas battered on one knuckle;

Connotes violence. Battered is different from milder words like wounded. The father seems potentially violent.

ALLITERATIONGentle protective sound of “hand . . . held,” in sharp contrast with battered knuckle and scraped ear that dominate the imagery of this stanza.

Hand holding a wrist more aggressive and domineering than a hand holding a hand.1. difference in size of their hands2. child waltzes unwillingly

Hand battered on one knuckle because of the hard work involved in running a greenhouse.

LINE 11 & 12

At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.

METERSecond half of the poem does not precisely repeat the metrical pattern of the first half of the poem, suggests that the father misses some steps.

LINE 13 & 14

You beat time on my headWith a palm caked hard by dirt,

The word beat is rougher than kept (as in “kept time”), recalls the word battered of previous stanza. This hand is not only dirty but hard, more a club than a hand.

MeterWord hard disrupts the poem’s otherwise perfect meter. The speaker has tried to render (save) his father’s dance but his father’s drunken missteps make it impossible to do so.

hard work involved in running a greenhouse.

LINE 15 & 16

Then waltzed me off to bedStill clinging to your shirt.

Breathless and happy after horsing around with his father, does not want to go to bed but desires to stay with him.

Second half of the poem (line 9-16) is generally tougher, with short, hard-sounding words and true end rhyme (e.g. dirt-shirt) There are no slant rhymes here; the structure is less relaxed, which leaves the reader feeling tense and uneasy.

SYMBOLWaltzed figuratively and literally, to bed. The poem indicates early on that the waltz is not easy, and yet it ends with the comfort and stability of bed.

WORD CHOICE (DICTION)INNOCENT VIOLENT

SmallWaltzRompedBed

DeathBatteredHardDirt

• Word order of the poem tends to move from light-hearted words (BEGINNING) to more ominous ones (END) , the poem is too ambiguous to let us pass judgment so easily.

• The overall effect is to sway the reader’s emotions violently, as in a drunken waltz.

TONE

INNOCENT VS VIOLENT

THEME• Domestic violence• Family relationships• Love between father and child