How Does Theodore Roethke Use Literary Devices

Back in the day, children were being abused by their parents, but it is still happening in today’s society. “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke explains his life when he was still a child back in the 1900s. Theodore Roethke was born on May 25, 1908 and lived until August 1, 1963. He had an abusive father growing up and the poem gives the reader a taste of what he had to go through, in the form of waltzing. Roethke uses literary devices, such as metaphor, imagery, and rhyme to allure the reader into his poem. One literary device Roethke uses is metaphor. Roethke continuously states that he is getting beaten by his drunken dad, but he also uses the word ‘waltz’ throughout the poem. In the first stanza, he says, “But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy.” He is saying that being beaten by his father is like dancing around in a waltz, which also gives it an ironic twist. Waltzing, in people’s mind, is a happy event, but Roethke uses the word despite the positive meaning put some positivity into the poem. This could also mean that even though he gets beat by his father, he still loves him.

Throughout the whole poem, he gives off images of conflicts he had with his father. In the first stanza, he gives off the image of him trying to hang on to his life. The poem also uses synthesia, the literary device for the other four senses. Roethke describes his father’s breathe of whiskey that could make a boy go dizzy. In the second stanza, he describes his father making a ruckus in the kitchen with his mother frowning. In the third stanza, he describes him being wounded by his father. In the fourth stanza, he gives off the image of him being beat by his father to bed. These images help the reader visualize what the narrator had to go through in his childhood. It gave the reader a feeling of how it felt like being in the narrator’s