I have read Theodore Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz” several times, and every I tend to find new insights in it. It is the same old story where a father comes home drunk and mistreats his family. That’s what a reader would think after one reading of it. I expressed I can relate to the son and father’s relationship, along with some of the emotions expressed in the poem.
As any poem that you read, it can interpret something different or the same depending on the reader. In the first stanza where it says, “The whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy/ But I hung on like death/ Such waltzing was not easy” (1-4).
This can explain that the father had come home from work drunk probably from a bar almost every night. If the father’s …show more content…
The child in the poem seems to have a tight relationship with his father waiting for him to get home every night and get a little beat up to go to bed. I can relate to one thing the father and son have in this poem when I was a child by the age of 7 or 8. My parents were divorced at the time and I would visit my father every other weekend. When Friday arrived and my sister and I waited for my father to pick us up from school or mom’s house. I was so happy at the fact, that I was going to see my dad for the next 2 days and we were going to have fun riding ATVs and go fishing. We waited for hours, even after the sun set that night. He never showed up but left a voicemail on my mom’s phone that he couldn’t make it for this weekend. This would happen multiple times down the future. His Guilt trip for not coming and leaving a heartfelt voicemail just doesn’t do it anymore. I can say that I shared the same feeling when I was a kid with the child from the poem of the feeling, you would get waiting for your father to come home and play with you. Who knows, maybe the child from the poem got tired of his father coming drunk as he grew up and ended up the same way I feel about my father.
To conclude about this personal essay about the poem “My Papa’s Waltz”, this poem does not interpret a father being abusive to his child while coming home drunk. It describes the relationship of a son that loves his father and would take a small beating for his father to put him to sleep every night. There are some comparisons between myself and the narrator between our father relationship’s and similar events that occurred. This poem has many unseen messages and I recommend it for everyone to read this poem, its
As any poem that you read, it can interpret something different or the same depending on the reader. In the first stanza where it says, “The whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy/ But I hung on like death/ Such waltzing was not easy” (1-4).
This can explain that the father had come home from work drunk probably from a bar almost every night. If the father’s …show more content…
The child in the poem seems to have a tight relationship with his father waiting for him to get home every night and get a little beat up to go to bed. I can relate to one thing the father and son have in this poem when I was a child by the age of 7 or 8. My parents were divorced at the time and I would visit my father every other weekend. When Friday arrived and my sister and I waited for my father to pick us up from school or mom’s house. I was so happy at the fact, that I was going to see my dad for the next 2 days and we were going to have fun riding ATVs and go fishing. We waited for hours, even after the sun set that night. He never showed up but left a voicemail on my mom’s phone that he couldn’t make it for this weekend. This would happen multiple times down the future. His Guilt trip for not coming and leaving a heartfelt voicemail just doesn’t do it anymore. I can say that I shared the same feeling when I was a kid with the child from the poem of the feeling, you would get waiting for your father to come home and play with you. Who knows, maybe the child from the poem got tired of his father coming drunk as he grew up and ended up the same way I feel about my father.
To conclude about this personal essay about the poem “My Papa’s Waltz”, this poem does not interpret a father being abusive to his child while coming home drunk. It describes the relationship of a son that loves his father and would take a small beating for his father to put him to sleep every night. There are some comparisons between myself and the narrator between our father relationship’s and similar events that occurred. This poem has many unseen messages and I recommend it for everyone to read this poem, its