“My Papas Waltz” by Theodore Roethke grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, a place that influences his work long after. Roethke’s father died of cancer when he was only fifteen and not long after the traumatic event he struggles with depression and mental illness. Roethke’s writing referred to his childhood as we see in this poem, his father. This can be interpreted in multiple ways. The poem could be interpreted as a parent abusing his child due to alcoholism or a child dancing with his father. This remind me of my own story as a child with my father. A child dancing with his parent is the way I interpreted the poem when Theodore describes the evening, I pictured a father dancing with his child and having fun after a hard day at work.
The author’s main character is a young boy describing an evening of dancing with his father and what he as a child is willing to endure from a loving parent. To be able to spend time with his father because of the child’s father working a lot as one could tell by Roethke describing the fingers of the adult male. I see the child enduring the pain of his father’s belt buckle scraping against his ear to be able to be close to his father. This remind me as my childhood, when my father will come home from working the whole day and trying to spend time with us before
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“My mother countenance could not unfrown itself,” (7,8). His mother was unhappy on what he was doing in the kitchen. It could mean that they were not very secure on the wall they had been on as well. As I grew in a small house and a big family, we never had enough room to be dancing. My mother will always get mad at my father because we will bump on everything and we well always make a mess. We see here that even the mother of the boy was unhappy to what the father was