ipl-logo

What Is The Tone Of My Papa's Waltz

1053 Words5 Pages

Poems can contain a plethora of concepts, feelings, and meanings which either the speaker or reader can bring forth and relate with. Theodore Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz” brings this into consideration, as the poem is oftentimes seen as an autobiographical account of Roethke’s own childhood experience. Having a conflicted relationship with his father, Roethke had written many poems about personal memories, mainly portraying a tension marked with both love and fear. Theodore Roethke utilizes rhythmic structure, symbolism, and ambiguity in “My Papa’s Waltz” to construct the implications of a temperamental relationship between father and son. The specific rhythmic structure and meter present within the poem insinuate the unstable relationship …show more content…

While certain words like whiskey, death, battered, scraped, and beat in the poem give off a dark and aggressive mood; the words dizzy, waltzing, easy, romped, knuckle, and buckle give off a clumsy and happy tone. The conflicting positive and negative connotations attributed to these words help to create an ambiguous meaning consistent with the rest of the poem; whether the father is dancing with his child or whether it is something more than that is left to the viewer's interpretation and never to the speaker of the poem. In the line “You beat time on my head”, the reader has to properly enunciate the letter “t” to give way to the rest of the poem (line 13). This emphasizes the “beat time” phrase—notably since the phrase is two stressed syllables—which can be alluded to the father training the child how to waltz or to some sort of physical tension (line 13). The poem also gives a passionate tone dedicated to the father from the speaker, as the speaker romanticizes many aspects of the dance—comparing it to a waltz. The line “But I hung on like death” emphasizes this love the child has for the father through the use of a simile (line 3). Another example would be “Still clinging to your shirt”, which could hint at the speaker still “clinging” to the memories of his father (line

Open Document