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Theodore Roethke Use Ambiguous Language In My Papa's Waltz

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Theodore Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz” describes the relationship between the speaker and his father. Throughout the poem’s four stanzas, Roethke purposefully uses ambiguous language, imagery, and metaphors to express different scenarios that provide room for interpretation. The situation is either the speaker’s recount of a happy moment dancing with his beloved father, or, a recollection of a child that is terrorized by an abusive father. Roethke uses the waltz as a metaphor and extends this imagery through specific language to further develop the poem’s vague meaning to disguise the horrors or enhance the joys of this memory. Roethke employs the extended metaphor of waltzing in “My Papa’s Waltz” through various poetic elements and devices …show more content…

Roethke’s particular word choices have connotations which alternate from abusive to affectionate while also working to both extend the waltz metaphor. The speaker depicts the situation with words which imply an abusive scenario, including “beat,” “scraped,” “battered,” and “death” (Roethke 3, 10, 12, 13). Scattered throughout the poem between this violent languages are words that hold meanings that typically are associated with fun and liveliness, such as “romped,” “unfrowned,” and even “waltzed” (Roethke 5, 8, 15). These word choices seem to contradict each other, but because of their place in the poem’s context the meaning of this language is vague. The word “waltzing” suggests that the father and the speaker are dancing happily together, but because the word follows “death,” the meaning could also more along the lines of fighting, in terms of child abuse (Roethke 4, …show more content…

Two lines after this image, there is the mention of “death,” a word which conveys a heavy and dark connotation implying violence in the case of a drunk father (Roethke 3). On the other hand, the speaker states in the second stanza that he and his father “romped until the pans / Slid from the kitchen shelf” (Roethke 5-6). The meaning of the word choice “romped” indicates a playful action, an image that conflicts with the violent language in the first

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