My Papa's Waltz Literary Devices

Waltz, Rhythm, and Rhyme A waltz is a rhythmed dance of partners that twirl around a dance floor. If said partners are words that rhyme and rhythm, and the dance floor made of paper; literary works of a poet are created. Theodore Roethke was a poet that mastered this skill and created “My Papa’s Waltz.” The choice of words and meter of lines send your imagination on a journey envisioning what is unfolding from the words set forth before you. The speaker in the poem, the structure of the poem and the elements use throughout the story all make the experience more enjoyable. “My Papa’s Waltz” is a poem about a father who has the smell of whiskey on his breath. After consuming maybe a tad too much alcohol he has decided to dance with his child. The dance takes place in the kitchen of their home as the child’s mother looks on disapprovingly. Once the father has finished his dance with his child, they dance once more on the way to bed where the child clings to his father’s shirt not wanting the dance to end. The title of the poem “My Papa’s Waltz” help to set the stage as to who the speaker of the …show more content…
In order for a poem to be considered written in closed form there has to be structural integrity to the poem, where there is repetition of meter, rhyme or stanza. Roethke uses all three of these components in “My Papa’s Waltz.” He rhymes the last word of every other line with each other. For example in lines one and three, and two and four the words, “breath” and “death” rhyme as well as “dizzy” and “easy”. This pattern of rhyming continues throughout the poem in each stanza, which is another key item to a closed form poem. Roethke wrote this poem in four stanzas all made up of four lines very similar in length and each of the lines have six to seven syllables creating rhythm. The rhythm and the rhymes help set the tone of the poem by making it happy and