My Papa's Waltz By Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” is a simple poem with a deeper meaning. When I first read this poem, I thought it was about a young boy dancing around the kitchen with his father. As I read it over again, I realized the sadness and despair tones of the poem. The young boy is blind to his father’s alcoholism. After analyzing the structure, diction, and overall theme of “My Papa’s Waltz”, I found a much darker meaning to this thought provoking poem. Roethke’s choice of structure has an interesting meaning in this poem. It contains four stanzas and is written as a quatrain, four line of stanzas with a rhyme scheme. The rhyme scheme for each stanza is abab; its meter is iambic trimeter. The structure is meant to make the poem read like a waltz. The three feet are meant to mimic the one-two-three pattern in the dance. This is interesting because the two are not dancing. When first reading the poem, this easy going …show more content…
This poem is very arguable about its meaning. Some people think that it is about a young boy dancing with his father, while others believe that the father is beating his son. I agree with the statement that the father is abusive; however I understand the theory of the dance too. I think that it is not clear that the father is abusive because of the perspective the poem is written in. Children who are raised in a house with alcoholic parents do not realize that anything is wrong. The boy loves his father, so he is blind to the abuse. His innocent mind does not realize what is really happening. The boy, however, notices his mother is unhappy. He says, “[m]y mother’s countenance/ Could not unfrown itself” (6-7). The boy thinks his mother is upset because “the pans/ Slid from the kitchen shelf” (4-5) when she is actually mad because of the father’s actions. She does not want him to be drunk and hurt her son. After realizing the childhood innocence theme of this poem, I changed my views on this