Misreading 'My Papa's Waltz'

Alcoholism and child abuse are in the mind of the misreader, not in the poem that romps, waltzes, and dramatizes the roughhousing afftection between father and son.

Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” has been misread even by well-educated professionals. Jeff Greenberg, Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona, offers a typical example of the misreading Roethke’s innocent drama of father and son roughhousing. In the professor’s lecture, titled “The impact of violence on our children: Some insights from Becker and the cinema,” he states the following which introduces Roethke’s poem: “Perhaps most uniquely disturbing is when our security base turns on us, conveying inconsistent values and unpredictable behaviors, and inflicting emotional and physical pain; how then does a child sustain equanimity? Even if brutal and deeply disturbed, the parent is typically still the only basis of security the child knows. Theodore Roethke expresses this problem eloquently.”

The professor could not be further from the truth, but fortunately, he says no more about the poem, allowing his mischaracterization to say it all. Contrary to the Professor Greenberg’s misreading, Theodore Roethke’s poem expresses love between a father and son in a roughhousing session that the adult speaker in the poem looking back chooses to metaphorically dramatize as a “waltz.” If the event portrayed in the poem resulted in “emotional and physical pain,” it is unlikely that the adult speaker would have allowed his readers to interpret the event as a special time when the father and son “romped until the pans / Slid from the kitchen shelf,” and then the father “waltzed me [the son] off to bed / Still clinging to your [the father’s] shirt.”

“Romped” is too playful a word for an emotionally and physically traumatized adult to use in looking back at a childhood event. And if the father were actually beating and abusing the child in an alcoholic rage, the child would not be clinging the father’s shirt, he would be trying to run away from him.

The time designations of the poem make it clear that the father and son did this kind of “waltzing” often. It was not just one session that the speaker is recounting. Notice he says, “Such waltzing was not easy.” The gerund “waltzing” signals that every time they engaged in this “dance,” the son was challenged to keep up with the father’s movements. The child enjoys this waltz not being easy, or else it would have become boring. The father challenged the boy to keep up with him as they “romped” around the kitchen making those pans slide off the shelf.

Also, if the session were one of abuse and beating by a drunken brute, the mother would have taken a more active rôle than just frowning. The mother does not even speak, signaling that she is only mildly annoyed by this masculine ritual. There are no indications that the father is abusive to either the child or the mother or any other members of the family. The poem reveals only a speaker who is an adult looking back at a playful time he spent with his father. The alcohol breath, the dirty hands, the clumsy romping, and beating time on the boy’s head are all just innocent challenging features that comprise the metaphor of the waltz, that so impressed the boy that as an adult he dramatizes the event so we can enjoy his challenging dance along with him and his family.

For a thorough analysis of “My Papa’s Waltz,” please see my article, “Roethke’s 'My Papa’s Waltz'.”