Comparing My Papa's Waltz And Daddy

In Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” both Poets have characters that are telling of their relationship or some kind of interaction the character had with their father. These poems are similar in some ways, but different in some ways. Regardless they both tell of a child and their relationship with their father. However the major difference between the two poems is Daddy is about Plath’s mother not her father; however this has no impact on the differences between the father child relationships in the poem. Both poets view their fathers differently in each of their poems. Roethke points out that the dad is a working man who drinks. He makes this evident when he says “the whiskey on your breathe” (1). Another way

Another difference between the two poems is Roethke doesn’t have the child admit their feelings towards the father figure. Where in Plath’s poem the last line of the poem where she writes “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (80). By writing those lines it is obvious that the child in the poem had a tough relationship with the father figure.
Both poems are similar in that, they tell about the relationship between father and child. Although the relationship between father and child in “Daddy” seems more troubled than it does in “My Papa’s Waltz.” When readers look over “My Papa’s Waltz” they can see that the father and son have some slight relationship issues.
Another thing that is similar between the two poems is both of the characters/narrators both express they want to hold on to their fathers. In Daddy this is expressed when Plath writes “At twenty I tried to die/ and get back, back, back to you” (58-60) Roethke expresses this when he writes “Then waltzed me off to bed, / still clinging to your shirt” (14-15). It is easy to see that both children in the poems want to hold onto their fathers no matter how difficult the relationship