My Papa's Waltz Imagery

Imagery is used by poets to get the reader to vividly construct a picture of what they are describing by using any of the five senses (p.741). The three poems, “My Papa’s Waltz,” “Digging,” and “A woman Mourned by Daughters,” all use imagery to vividly describe the parent/child relationships. In the poem “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, the imagery used describes a boy’s relationship with his father as close, playful, and fearful as they danced around their house. The poem “Digging” by Seamus Heaney uses imagery to describe a son’s admiration for his hard-working father. Lastly, the poem “A Woman Mourned by Daughters” by Adrienne Rich uses imagery to describe a resentful relationship between a deceased mother and her daughters.

The title of the poem uses visual imagery by use of the word “waltz.” A waltz is a dance in which 2 people closely dance in fast circles (Waltz). In the last stanza, Roethke also describes the close bond by stating “Then waltzed me off to bed / still clinging to his shirt” (Line 16). The poet continues to use imagery by stating “We romped until the pans / slid from the kitchen shelf”. The word “romped” provides even more detail that the father and son were energetically and roughly dancing (Romp). Roethke uses both olfactory and visual imagery to give the reader a sense that boy’s father might be intoxicated and clumsy by stating “The whiskey on your breath/could make a small boy dizzy” (1-2). The poem’s visual imagery also indicates that the boy may be in fear of getting hurt by his father’s clumsiness “but I hung on like death” (3). The poet of “My Papa's Waltz” uses several examples of imagery to describe a father and son's close bond by dancing throughout their house playfully, but because the father was drunk, the child was also scared that his father might unintentionally hurt him by his