Disgust in "My Papa's Waltz"

¶ … Disgust in "My Papa's Waltz" Love and hurt are two things we can never avoid and we often carry memories of both into adulthood. A poem that proves this bittersweet point is "My Papa's Waltz," by Theodore Roethke. The poem shows us a child's love and fear of a parent, and demonstrates how memory holds together the moment of the waltz in time that seems to encapsulate the speaker's entire childhood.

In a touching poem that balances love and disgust, the speaker illustrates how bittersweet life is through tone and point-of-view. Each stanza of the poem unravels the essence of the scenario. The story unfolds giving us the indication that the father had returned from the pub, and finding his sleeping son had grabbed him to dance with him. The wife was disapproving, particularly with the pots sliding, but the dad didn't care, drifting off into his self-focused dance-world, beating time on his son's head.

The waltz may be a metaphor for the wrestling or roughhousing that the father and son engage in. The imagery is playful. The meter and rhythm of the poem reflects the steps and movements of a waltz. A waltz has a regular meter and a consistent cadence. It is an up-and-down movement in three-quarter time, and that pulse comes across in the poem.

The waltz can also be a metaphor of the father's lifestyle; the ebb and flow of the pulsation of the waltz as symbolized in the poem is also the pulsation of the father's lifestyle (Underwood, 5). The first two lines of the poem rapidly set the tone and portray a vivid picture as the father must have appeared to the boy; there is the imagery of the whisky, for instance, on the father's breath. And the phrase "I hung on like death" that denotes a child's fear of falling or tension.

To the child "such waltzing was not easy." The phrase, too, "you beat time on my head" tells us something of the child's height, as well as the father's strength. The description about the hand is an evocative phrase. And 'sliding' is again consistent with the dance movements of a waltz. The waltz is a form of rough horsing, and Roetke shows both in his poem, with tension jostling fun. The rhythmic romp of the waltz can be felt in the poem's iambic trimetrical quatrains.

The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy." (lines 1-4) But although the whisky is mentioned, the father does not come off as a drunk. The poem is a little field of energy with each stanza its own compact form of energy and essence. It is a closed form poem.