My Papa's Waltz

In sharing a moment from the poet’s childhood that has remained with him for years, the poem juxtaposes what the child perceives is happening against what the adult understands in retrospect.

The poem’s tone becomes increasingly alarming, and the interactions between the father and son reveal latent violent tendencies masked by this “waltz.” In the end, the poem reveals that the boy is scared of his father in ways that he cannot explain but that the poet, from the knowing perspective of years later, understands: The father was something of a bully, and even in play, the dynamic between the father and son works to emphasize the father’s domineering size and brute strength against the son’s helplessness, vulnerability, and fear. The dance reveals that perhaps that child has much to fear in a father who demands obedience and must, to borrow from Roethke’s metaphor, stay in control of the dance.

The poem begins with a cautionary note—the poet first focuses on the alcohol that drives his father’s playfulness. The smell of the alcohol, enough to make the boy “dizzy” (Line 2), reveals that the narrative will be driven by unhealthy alcohol use. That the boy, directed to dance with his drunk father, clings to him “like death” (Line 3) underscores an unsettling dimension to what should be a memorable father-son moment, a giddy and silly dance before the boy goes off to bed. That the father mimics the precise and careful choreography of a waltz suggests the irony of the boy and his helplessness: The waltz is such a demanding sequence of steps that the boy can hardly be expected to follow his father’s direction. Thus, the first stanza emphasizes the boy’s helplessness and the father’s lack of concern for the boy’s emotional status.

When, in the second stanza, the boisterous dancing upends the pans on the kitchen shelf, the adult poet introduces the idea of unleashing chaos. The play idea starts to collapse of its own irony as the father is indifferent to the chaos he is so deliberately unleashing. Without the poet intervening, the poem makes clear the dictatorial nature of the father’s position: As the pans tumble to the floor and the mother says nothing, we see it is the father’s home, his world, and no one can challenge even the unreasonableness of his antics. What the poet recalls is the helplessness of the mother who sits at the table unable, unwilling, or perhaps uninterested in stepping in to interdict the father’s drunken behavior. The poet thus sets up a household under the control of a man driving them to act after his lead and to allow him whatever liberty he needs to do whatever he wants, no matter how unreasonable, such as whipping up a dervish in a tiny kitchen. The verb “romped” (Line 5) suggests the boy’s perspective, the hope that this dance might only be play between a loving parent and a child. That the mother’s face is set in a perpetual frown—we are told she could not “unfrown” (Line 8) her face—indicates that the dancing is a manifestation of a far darker kind of domestic authoritarian control. The father, despite creating chaos, cannot be stopped, not by the mother and certainly not by the child clinging to his shirt.

The vocabulary in the third stanza reflects that perhaps the child, who loves his father and wants to appease him, lives in quiet fear of his father’s power over him. The poet recalls that his wrist was being “held” (Line 9) in his father’s massive, calloused hand. Seen from the perspective of a child, that hand gripping his wrist suggests restraint, the assertion of power that intimidates. The father’s knuckle is “battered” (Line 10) by an ambiguous cause; therefore, the reader is left in the position of the child. Is the battered knuckle a sign of the father’s manual labor, a suggestion of his physical prowess? Is the battered knuckle an indication that, drunk, he has gotten into a barroom brawl, a forbidding hint of his aggressive nature? Or, is the battered knuckle a remnant of some earlier beating of the child himself, a warning that the father has the power to inflict great harm on the child without accountability or responsibility? It is at that point the boy’s ear scrapes against the father’s belt buckle, perhaps a reminder to him, even as he strains to keep up with his father’s boisterous movements, of his father’s discipline tactics, perhaps weaponizing the belt and the massive buckle as instruments of discipline. The reader is left suspended amid such possibilities in a way that mimics the child and, in turns, raises the anxiety.

The closing stanza raises a question that reflects this ambiguity: Does the father beat time through the innocent tapping on his son’s head to help the dance and to help his son keep time? Or, does the calloused and heavy hand, “caked hard by dirt” (Line 14), enforce the growing terror in the boy’s mind that he must keep his father happy or face the consequences of a disciplinary beating? The poem closes with the father heading the boy off to bed without incident. However, the boy is hardly relieved: He moves toward the sanctuary of his bedroom still clinging to his father’s shirt, symbolically still dependent on the unpredictable actions of a father who reveals his tendency to express love through aggression, petty violence, chaotic behavior, selfish indulgence, and physical intimidation. The gentle, even playful, feeling of the opening stanza is gone. The boy is in bed but hardly safe. The poem closes with the feeling that the child has somehow dodged some greater harm but that the threat is anything but resolved. Indeed, the authoritarian father and the passive mother will be waiting for him when he wakes.