"Inside is where the son and father will always be holding hands"(Adam Johnson). All children one way or another have a special bond between them and their father. But, a father and son form an unbreakable bond. It's natural for a father to groom his son and teach him things he himself faced when he was once young. The poem "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke entails a memory of a small boy and father perceived to be having a good time and having a good time and dancing despite the father being drunk. “My Papa’s Waltz” is a positive childhood experience because the drunk father made time for his son, the father worked hard to provide for his family and the small boy loved his father unconditionally.…
In “My Papa’s Waltz’ by Theodore Roethke, the speaker’s tone towards his father is one that is loving and admiring. This is seen in the word choice of the speaker when interacting with his father.…
The poem contains no end rhyme; it does contain internal rhyme, in lines 2-6 and 8 &10. The use of short words containing hard consonants are clothes, blueblack, cold, cracked, ached, weekday, banked, thanked, wake, breaking, call, chronic, speaking. These words emphasize the hardness of life for the speaker's father.…
"My Papa's Waltz" is one of most popular contemporary poems written by Theodore Roethke. The poem was first published in 1942 by Heast Magazines, Inc. from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. It is a poem about a boy recalling a time with his father while they share a dance of waltz. This poem consists of four quatrains written in iambic trimeter with a simple rhyme scheme. It uses imagery, metaphors, and simile to invoke a strong impression. Each image captures an emotional richness all told from an innocent point of view of a child. At first glance, this poem has a tone of playfulness that captures the bond between father and son. Yet as one looks closely, the poem has a curious ambiguity that evokes multiple interpretations. The use of sardonic words to describe an affectionate moment is misleading and ultimately the readers are left to wonder whether the boy in the poem is suggesting some type of abuse or…
The poems title, “My Papa’s Waltz”, is the first indication of the authors intended tone. Roethke had innumerable choices for the title of his poem, so we must…
"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke is a four quatrain poem written in iambic trimeter. The rhyme scheme present is abab, cdcd, efef, and ghgh. In the poem, the son is remembering a time when his father, who was excessively drunk at the time, carrying him through the kitchen off to bed. It was a rough, almost abusive, journey though because his father, who is already drunkenly waltzing him, is probably not used to handling things with care at work since his hands are described as "caked hard by dirt" and "battered on one knuckle". The speaker in the poem, the son, is clearly holding onto this memory of his father for whatever reason: maybe he died early, was working all the time, or abandoned the family.…
In the poem the author uses rhyme schemes to show the purpose of the essay with ease. The rhyme scheme here is kept simple in order to keep the reader interested. It goes A, B, A, B throughout the whole poem, which is only three stanzas. The rhyming in the poem also makes the poem very clear to the point that you can see what is going on throughout the poem. He rhymes everything in the poem, even the metaphors. He uses this to show the purpose of the poem and the purpose it that blacks and white can be together, they can be friends, and nobody should judge them for it.…
Despite the dulcet cadence of the poem’s syntax, Roethke’s diction in certain lines of the poem disrupt the idealist dance that a son and father are participating in. With its simple ABAB rhyme scheme and trecet iambs, the true action of the poem is often lost among the sing-song quality of the lines; the rhythm almost acts as background music for the waltzing son and father. Themes of adoration and love are portrayed when the son “hung on” to his father (Roethke l. 3), implying that he appreciated the time he spent with his. The full line, however, states that the son “hung on like death”, which changes the tone of the poem from something that is cheerful to something that is violent and grim. This tone continues in the second stanza as they “romped until the pans/ Slid from the kitchen shelf” (ll. 5-6); these words used together create a scene of tumult and cacophony. The diction used in the poem creates a tone that can be rendered as both…
I believe I was most focus on the detail of the fathers’ hands. After rereading and thinking about what each word meant, and analyzing the reaction of the other characters (son and mother) in the poem I began to picture exactly what the poem was about. I think the meaning of this poem, was about a hardworking man. A man that had a few drinks than decide to dance and hang out with his son. The mother thought that the father’s drinking was getting out of hand. In this poem I think it sends out a message to the parents. No matter how young your child is, they acknowledge lots of things and it will stick to their minds. For instances, I quote Theodore Roethke “Papa’s Waltz”– “The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy But I hung on like death Such waltzing was not easy”, (Clugston, 2010, Ch. 10.5). This would be something for a kid to remember, the strong smell of liquor coming from his father was hard for him to inhale while dancing together. I believe things happening in this poem are experienced by many…
When analyzing the poem even the title has meaning besides its obvious use. The author uses the word papa, which is a child’s term for father, this clues us in that a child wrote this, but the author also uses adult language “countenance”, this provides reasonable evidence that this is a memory. This poem also has a formulated pattern of every other line rhyming. This could stand for the…
“Those Winter Sundays” and “My Papa’s Waltz” were written by two different authors so naturally there are some differences within them. Roethke chose to use closed form in "My Papa 's Waltz" so the work has a distinct structure and rhyme scheme. There are four stanzas within the poem, and each stanza consists of four lines and has a rhyme scheme of A-B; A-B. For example if one was to look at the final words per line for the first stanza, they would find it reads as follows “breath, dizzy, death, easy.” On the other hand, Robert Hayden uses a very different form to create "Those Winter Sundays." Hayden uses open form which demonstrates varying length of the poem 's three stanzas and the different count of each line. The style that Hayden chose for his work allows the poem to be read in a manner that resembles a conversation.…
In My Papa’s Waltz the kid goes describes what it is like doing the waltz with his father. Their recollection seems to be something in between a positive and negative memory by having a change of mind in the middle of the poem. They discusses how their mother feels about the damage that they are causing, how the smell on their father’s breath smelt like whiskey, described what their father was like. Even though the kid was having fun the mother was not happy because they were wrecking the kitchen. The kid explains that it was a challenge to waltz when their dad when he had been drinking. They go into some detail about what the father was wearing and looked like.…
This is also seen at the very beginning of the poem. The child states: “But I hung on like death / Such waltzing was not easy (3-4). These lines show that the child is having trouble dancing with the father since he is having to hold on like death and says that the waltzing is not easy. The child also stated: “Then waltzed me off to bed / Still clinging to your shirt (15-16). These lines show that the child is clinging to the father probably in fear. A person may argue that the child is holding on tight because of the love he has for that father. If this were the case, the child wouldn’t have brought up that the dancing was difficult. The hard dancing and the child holding on tight shows that the child is not enjoying dancing with the father and is more than likely fearing…
The rhyme scheme is very regular in the first stanza, and it is as follows: A, B, A, B. The rhythm is also regular in the first stanza, where each 'A' line has seven syllables, and all 'B' lines have eight syllables. The effect of this regular rhyme scheme and rhythm, is that it allows the reader to read the poem smoothly, and absorb the content while creating images in the reader's mind, of this person. The second verse is slightly different from the first one, and the topic changes to the fact that his love is not returned: "I think about my being-in-love, and touch the flesh you wear so well. I think about my being-in-love, and wish you were as well."…
You made very good point with the rhyme scheme I did not notice. I was not familiar with this style of poem but it was a nice poem. I like that the author wanted his father to “not go gentle.” I did not know that this poem was about the father going blind to fight that darkness. I thought that the authors father was dying.…