Poem #4: "My Papa's Waltz" Theodore Roethke

"The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy. 

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself. 

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle. 

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt."

I felt that Theodore Roethke's poem was very heavy; reading it really made me feel a sort of deep sadness, like melancholy, although I think it has to do with father issues that I have in my own life.

What I questioned throughout the poem was if the father was really dancing or if it was just a literary technique the author incorporated to visually represent his movements, or to even soften them if, in reality, they were violent and rough. I just find something really beautiful about his poem. It's this contrast between destruction, which the father sort of brings in with his heavy intoxication and how the smell is so powerful it could "make a small boy dizzy" as well as the mother's sadness as she watches, but the most admirable part is that the boy isn't even ignorant to his father's drunkenness. Now that I think about it, maybe the father is actually really gentle and just wanted to dance with his son but because he's drunk, it turned to be a little rough. In the end the boy is still clinging to his father's shirt which should means that he enjoyed the dance.

Have you ever seen a part of a movie where it's an action scene but instead of hearing the fighting and the guns, there's opera playing in the background over the whole thing? That's the way I pictured this poem. With the two of them roughly waltzing in the kitchen as the mother watches and opera music crescendos in the background over the sound of the destruction and pans falling.