My Papas Waltz By Theodore Roethke

Readers of poetry usually understand that interpreting a poem often fosters disagreement. Theodore Roethke’s poem, “My Papa’s Waltz,” for example, generates frequent debate about the situation. This poem illustrates harmless play between a hard-working father and his young son. Not everyone who reads “My Papa’s Waltz” believes that the father is innocent and hard-working. There are many lines in the poem that can be portrayed in different ways. In the first stanza line three, “but I hung on like death,” this line could be used as an expression meaning his father is moving quicker than what he can keep up with. The line is similar to a common used phrase, I hung on for dear life. Another line like this in the poem is line 16, “still clinging to your shirt.” If the child was being abused, as some readers might assume, the boy wouldn’t be trying to hold on, he would be trying to get away from his father. …show more content…
Such as from line 14, “his palm caked hard with dirt.” Also lines 9 and 10, “the hand that held my wrist was battered on one knuckle.” From these lines, the father seems to be a hard-working man. The father possibly just came home from his hard-working job, but before he came home, he may have gone to get a drink after work, causing the smell of whiskey on his breath, found in line 1. The father drinking also leads to line 12, “at every step you missed my right ear scraped a buckle.” While waltzing the father missed steps due to his drinking or it could just simply be because he is a bad dancer, causing the son’s ear to scrape his father’s belt buckle in line 12. These actions lead some readers to think the father was overly drunk and was abusing his son with his belt