Poetry Explication Example

Dr. O’Conner

"Questions of Abuse in "My Papa’s Waltz"

Many of the words and phrases in Theodore Roethke’s poem, "My Papa’s Waltz," could be misinterpreted as indicating physical abuse between the father and son in the poem without a prior knowledge of Roethke’s relationship with his immigrant father, Otto Roethke. A close reading and analysis of the poem and research into Roethke’s life help to avoid such misreadings.

According to Karl Malkoff, Roethke had a deep, almost religious respect for his father. This respect was religious (in a Christian sense) because Roethke had an admiration for his father’s ability, yet he was fearful of his strength. To the young Roethke, who had followed his father around the greenhouses that his father owned and worked in, Otto was the man who made the flowers grow, and like so many young boys, Roethke idolized his father.

Of course, the young Roethke also had good reason to fear and respect his father’s firmness. According to Malkoff, Roethke once saw his father bring a couple of poachers to a halt with his rifle and then go and slap their faces for interrupting his work. "Otto Roethke, a Prussian through and through, was strong and firm, but his strength was, for his son, a source of both admiration and fear, of comfort and restriction" (Malkoff 4). This fear, combined with the love and awe-inspired dependency that a son has for his father, comes out clearly in the poem.

Many readers of the first stanza jump to the conclusion that the father and son in this poem are locked in some sort of dark dance of death and the boy is in some sort of danger. Certainly, the father and son are not "waltzing" in the conventional sense; they are horseplaying. The rythmic romp of the waltz can be felt in the poet’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)

In this first stanza, Roethke mentions the whisky on his father’s breath but certainly does not portray him as a stumbling drunk. Many people drink alcohol in the evening without becoming intoxicated. Also, the boy "hung on like death" (line 3) not because he was terrified or feared for his life but because he was having fun and did not want to fall off . . . such waltzing is not easy!

Reothke continues,

"We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother’s countenance

Could not unfrown itself." (lines 5-8)

This was a rowdy waltz and the dancing pair did make quite a ruckus but in lines seven and eight Roethke says that the mother’s countenance could not unfrown itself, which implies that the mother herself could stop frowning if she chose to. He suggests that the mother was angry because her pots and pans were flying around, but was really trying not to laugh at the spectacle of father and son dancing together. If the boy were being hurt and the waltz was not in good fun, his mother probably would have reacted with more than a mere frown.

Reothke’s third stanza goes on with,

"The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle." (lines 9-12)

Safely assuming that this is an autobiographical poem and that Roethke is reminiscing about his father, the third stanza could be over-read or misinterpreted if the reader is ignorant of Roethke’s relationship with his father. Reothke’s father’s hand would have been battered on one knuckle because of all the gardening and hard work involved in running a greenhouse and not because he had been beating his family members. Even though Otto Roethke had been known to be violent with poachers, no violence was ever directed towards his family.

In the last stanza, the son proves to be content and "still clinging" to his dirt caked father.

"You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt." (lines 13-16)

The boy is probably breathless and happy after horsing around with his father and he apparently does not want to go to bed but desires to stay with him. Others who misread "beat time on my head" as indicative of physical abuse, again, are not finishing the lines before jumping to conclusions.

In the final analysis, the tendency to see a dark, abusive father in this poem is far overstated. Though Roethke does seem to work into his poetry images of love mingled with the fear and respect due to a proud and powerful Prussian father, a case cannot be made for anything approaching child abuse here.

Works Cited

Malkoff, Karl. Theodore Roethke. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.

Roethke, Theodore. "My Papa’s Waltz." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 6th ed. Ed. Carl E. Bain, et al. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1995. 769.