Theodore Roethke’s poem, My Papa’s Waltz

The relationship which is depicted in Theodore Roethke’s poem, “My Papa’s Waltz” is that of a father and son. The poem is “spoken” by a the son who reminisces about the way his drunken father used to dance with him before bed-time while his mother watched nervously. The opening lines of the poem emphasize the father’s drinking and the fear which accompanied the dancing for the boy: “The whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy;/ But I hung on like death:/ Such waltzing was not easy” (Roethke).
The words “dizzy” and “death” seem to evoke a sinister sense, one which extends into the following stanza: “We romped until the pans/ Slid from the kitchen shelf; / My mother’s countenance/ Could not unfrown itself. ” (Roethke). The poem moves very quickly from a sense of nostalgia and familial memory, to an urgent sense of violence and sadness. The reader begins to understand that the words “waltz” and “romp” are euphemistic and that any dance which knocks pans off the shelf and makes the mother frown must be — not ordinary dancing. In fact, “dancing” may itself be a euphemism for child-abuse.
The next lines make this violent connotation even more clear: “The hand that held my wrist/Was battered on one knuckle;/At every step you missed/My right ear scraped a buckle. ” (Roethke). At this point the poem begins to reveal its obvious duality: at one level it is a poem about the intimacy of fathers and sons, but at another, perhaps, deeper level, it is a poem about child abuse and about the violence which often exists between fathers and sons.

The concluding lines: “You beat time on my head/With a palm caked hard by dirt,/Then waltzed me off to bed/Still clinging to your shirt. (Roethke) fail to produce any sort of closure regarding the tension of violence between the father and son, nor does the poem seem to shed any sense of forgiveness or understanding on behalf of the narrator who speaks the poem much later in life after time has made him, also, a man. The tone of the poem suggest that euphemism replaces true understanding in bad relationships, in abusive relationships. The poem shows no sense of healing or gained wisdom from abuse, but merely the power to endure by the virtue of memory’s capacity to transform the horrible into a ritualistic symbol of the original fear that incited it.