Theodore Roethke’s poem, “My Papa’s Waltz”

The relationship which is depicted in Theodore Roethkes numbers, My Papas Waltz is that of a father and son. The poem is spoken by a the son who reminisces rough the way his drunken father used to dance with him before bed-time sequence his mother watched nervously. The opening lines of the poem emphasize the fathers drinking and the tending which accompany the dancing for the boy The whiskey on your breath/ Could puzzle a small boy dizzy/ But I hung on akin wipeout/ Such waltzing was not easy (Roethke).The language dizzy and death seem to evoke a sinister mother wit, one which extends into the following stanza We romped until the pans/ Slid from the kitchen ledge / My mothers countenance/ Could not unfrown itself. (Roethke). The poem moves very quickly from a sense of nostalgia and familial memory, to an urgent sense of violence and sadness. The reader begins to understand that the words waltz and romp are euphemistic and that any dance which knocks pans take away the sh elf and makes the mother frown must be not familiar dancing. In fact, dancing may itself be a euphemism for child-abuse.The next lines make this violent connotation even more clear The hand that held my carpus/Was battered on one knuckle/At every whole step you missed/My right ear scraped a buckle. (Roethke). At this point the poem begins to reveal its obvious duality at one level it is a poem about the intimacy of fathers and sons, but at another, perhaps, deeper level, it is a poem about child abuse and about the violence which often exists surrounded by fathers and sons.The concluding lines You beat time on my head/With a laurel caked hard by dirt,/Then waltzed me off to bed/Still clinging to your shirt. (Roethke) disclose to produce any sort of closure regarding the tension of violence surrounded by the father and son, nor does the poem seem to shed any sense of gentleness or understanding on behalf of the narrator who speaks the poem much ulterior in life after time has made him, also, a man. The tincture of the poem suggest that euphemism replaces true understanding in bad relationships, in abusive relationships. The poem shows no sense of healing or gained recognition from abuse, but merely the power to endure by the virtue of memorys subject to transform the horrible into a ritualistic symbol of the original fear that incited it.