To read the poem, please visit Favorite Poem Project: “My Papa’s Waltz.”
To hear the poem read by the poet, please click here.
Poetic Devices
Rime scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GHGH
Rhythm: Iambic trimeter
Metaphor: “Waltz” is a metaphor for the wrestling, roughhousing, romping that the father and son engage in.
Simile: “I hung on like death”
Hyperbole (Exaggeration): The simile “I hung on like death” is also an hyperbole. Probably another hyperbole is “We romped until the pans / Slid from the kitchen shelf.”
Commentary
The speaker in Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” is a man looking back at an event in his childhood. While treated in the poem as a single event, it seems to represent reoccurring similar events that speak to the relationship between the father and son.
The title of the poem indicates an activity, a dance. Immediately, we wonder why a man would want to write about a dance and call it his father’s, and why a waltz? Did his father compose the music to a waltz?
In the first stanza, the speaker answers those questions by portraying the waltz as a session of roughhousing that fathers and sons engage in during their quality time together. The speaker indicates it was challenging for a small boy to contend with his father’s prowess, especially because the whiskey on the father’s breath was somewhat overwhelming for a boy so small, but the speaker also asserts that even though he was just a small boy, he was up to the challenge: even though his father’s dance was not easy to follow, he was able to keep up with him, by literally hanging on to the father as he bounded around the room.
The second stanza continues the playful scuffing as the two “romped” with such gusto that caused the pots and pans to fall from the shelves. To underscore the macho nature of their masculine wrestling-match, the speaker reports that his mother, who had probably just placed those pans on the shelves where they belong, did not approve of their disruptive behavior. Although she did not try to stop them by nagging at them, she did show her disapproval by a constant “frown.”
In the third stanza, the “waltz” continues with the father holding the boy’s wrist and the father clumsily missing steps, causing the boy’s ear to come painfully in contact with his belt buckle. The speaker also describes his father’s hand: one knuckle is battered. This important image suggests that the father was a laborer, a man who worked with his hands, as opposed to being a white-collar worker in an office.
The fourth and final stanza sees the couple of roughhousing guys winding down their metaphorical dance; the father is keeping time on the son’s head with his working-man’s dirt-caked hand, and then suddenly the father whisks the son off to bed. The son still hangs on to his father, probably reluctant to have their “waltz” come to an end, and “waltz” that had provided a time of playfulness and challenge that the boy cherishes.
The adult looking back at the event has portrayed his time with his father as an important event in their relationship. He describes his father as a robust man who knew how to give his son good time while challenging him to follow his lead in his metaphorical waltz.
