20 pages • 40 minutes read
Theodore RoethkeMy Papa's Waltz
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1942A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Father and Son Dynamic
At the emotional heart of this poem is the complex relationship between a father and a young son. If the predictive model for a son’s emotional evolution is the template of the father, the poem positions the son as a dependent, vulnerable to the expression of the father’s commanding presence and unable to react in any way but fear and need. The boy is too young to rebel but too old to escape into a coaxing fantasy world appropriate to a child, suggested here by the retreat in the last line to his bedroom and, presumably, to the easy escape of sleep.
The child clinging to the father’s shirt during their impromptu dancing in the kitchen suggests the deep dependency of a son on the father’s presence. The poet, writing years afterwards, describes the clinging as strong as “death” (Line 3), an ambiguous simile that disturbs because it creates a dissonance between the father and son. It suggests something sinister about the relationship that the poet recognized only in retrospect. For now, the son feels the father’s power.
The poem emphasizes the father’s commanding physical presence through disembodied bits, such as his large hands caked with dirt and his thumping on the boy’s head. These physical attributes suggest the father’s primitive roughness, which leaves the son poised between loving and fearing such a dominating father. The son wants to dance with his father, wants to match his energy and exuberant kinetics. However, the father is less agile and less adept at the demands of the dance he initiates. The son then is suspended between keeping his father happy and his own growing awareness of his own vulnerability and his father’s unpredictability. Indeed, more elaborate readings of the poem have suggested that the “waltzing” in the kitchen is a metaphor for the adult poet struggling to recount a beating at the hands of his drunk father.
The Corrosive Effects of Alcohol
How does a child come to understand the deleterious effects of alcohol? Minus the opening line’s reference to the father’s whiskey-soaked breath (so potent it made the boy “dizzy” [Line 2]), and the poem loses much of its dark intensity and quiet terror. Unless the poet discloses that his father had been drinking heavily, the escapade in the kitchen might read like an impromptu family fun night, father and son dancing together before sending the boy off to bed, all under the watchful eye of a mother only pretending to disapprove of the antics.
Given Roethke’s position as a confessional poet who mined his own life experiences as subjects fit for poetic treatment, biography tempts. Both Roethke and his father had an alcohol use disorder. That the father is drunk alters the dynamics of the poem, undercutting any possibility that the father engages his son from authentic emotions.
Alcohol makes ironic any claim the father might have to be bonding with his son. He dances about the kitchen, not because he wants to light up his son’s evening after a long day away from the house. He is drunk, and his movements are careless and clumsy enough to send the pans toppling from the kitchen shelf. The dance, symbolically suggesting the possibility of a dynamic between the father and son, is compromised. The more the son dances, the more he clings to his father; the more his father beats time on his head, the more the son recoils. The son does not move closer to his father but grows more disturbed by his own apprehension over his father’s behavior. Too young to understand the complex reality of unhealthy alcohol use but too old to miss the cues, the boy is left suspended, anxious, and uncertain.
The Unreliability and Power of Memory
The narrative dynamic suggests the poem is a recollection by an adult of a night he cannot forget: the night he tried to dance with his inebriated father. No attempt is made to link that slender memory to any long-term relationship between the father and son. The narrative itself is cased in the past tense, suggesting the work of memory, rather than in the present, appropriate to a narrative. The adult struggles now with the implications of that memory, distancing himself from himself, calling himself “a small boy” (Line 2).
Unlike more traditional memory poems, the adult narrator offers no overarching explanations, no long-after-the-fact epiphanies to clarify the chaotic dancing in the kitchen. Rather the poem works to leave the text suspended, much like the boy that night, between and among possible readings. The memory is shrouded in ambiguity, which is appropriate to a man recalling an event from his distant childhood. The man understands more than the child, perhaps, but allows the poem to speak from the child’s limited awareness. Memory then is complicated and unreliable, struggling with details but unable to connect those details into a single clear experience. Confession, here, does not bring with it absolution or even resolution, and it does not guarantee wisdom. The mechanics of memory here unsettle rather than reassure and confound rather than explain. Such, Roethke argues, is the absolute value and limited worth of memory itself.
