The poem my papa’s waltz my Theodore Roethke is a famous 20th century American poet. His poems are typically woven with lots of imagery and have intricate rhyme schemes. This poem is about a young boys intimate relationship with his father. I think the poet is the speaker of the poem and he’s sharing his own experience with the readers through his poem.
The first stanza is all about how his drunken father has just returned home after a long hard day of work. He is in the mood for celebration and grabs his son and begins to forcefully drag him into a waltz. We know that the father was too drunk to realize that he was hurting his own son by the enjambment “the whisky on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy.”