In My Papa's Waltz

Two people, a father and his son, say their own little prayer before bed. The son asks the Lord to make him into the man that his dad is. The father asks the Lord to make him into the man his son thinks he is. As adults, particularly as a father of a child, we need to realize that the success of our children weighs heavy on our shoulders. There are things I remember as a child vividly and for some reason I tend to hold on to the negative ones. I have a toolbox that I am constantly adding things to that I think will help me mold my son.

In My Papas’s Waltz, a poem by Theodore Roethke, the first line reads “The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy” (lines 1 – 2). Assuming that the poem is about a son’s father and starting off

One could assume that this means that it is hard to dance. Others, like myself, believe that the waltz in this poem is just a metaphor and the child is actually referring to the motions that occur when his father drinks. Holding on like death represents internal struggles that the boy has with dealing with his father’s drinking and his inability to let go of him or it. We can see that the reader describes a loud and rowdy dance. In the next four lines the writer describes the loud movements of the dance and the frown on the mother’s face that would not go away (lines 5 -8). You could say that the father is a loud obnoxious drunk. You could also assume that the frown on the mothers face is always there as she watches and does nothing about the

Looking deeper into it, it seems that the older gentleman is keeping some pieces to himself. This, to me, represents passing on what I feel is a good trait but holding onto what I don’t want you to have. One difference between the poem and the picture would be the age of the individuals. “At every step you missed my right ear scraped a buckle” (lines 11-12). These lines represent either the height of the child, which would be his father’s waist, or a more in depth meaning could be the spanking of the child. I say child because either one of the two scenarios would only make sense if it was a young boy. The younger of the two in the picture resembles a young man.

Furthermore, the difference in age can be identified in the last stanza of the poem where the writer says, “you beat time on my head with a palm caked hard by dirt, then waltzed me off to bed still clinging to your shirt” (13 – 16). These lines reiterate both the younger age of the child and the unconditional love the child has for his father and their waltz. This dance that they do, that they seem to do often, has just tore the house up, upset his mother, and from what it sounds like hurt him both physically and emotionally. With that being said, he clung to his father’s shirt because he didn’t want it to