My Papa's Waltz

The form here is regular and predictable; the poem is a regimented, careful structure. Reflecting Roethke’s study and his appreciation of traditional poetic forms, “My Papa’s Waltz” is a ballad form: The story is delivered in rhymed quatrains (or four-line stanzas) in which the first and third lines rhyme and the second and fourth lines rhyme. This form recalls centuries earlier, when minstrels would travel town to town and sing these ballads, using the rhyme scheme as a memory tool. Indeed, Roethke’s poem has been transcribed as a folk song and as a waltz.

The irony here is that this carefully structured form shares an account of a night in which a drunken father unleashes a quiet chaos in his own kitchen in compelling his hesitant young son to dance with him. The tidy form emphasizes the conflict central to understanding the psychological impact of this memory on the boy, now a grown adult. The boy understands order; he understands a kitchen with the pans on the shelf and his father, when sober, going about his day. This night, however, the child is introduced to a world of unsettling chaos even as he clings to the idea of reassuring stability and order, suggested here by his desperate clinging to his father’s shirt even as he is whirled about the kitchen. That sense of emerging chaos is underscored structurally in how seldom the lines have an end-stop punctation, a poetic device known as enjambment. The lines within each stanza flow into each other, defying the line break, creating that sense of dizzying momentum of the dancing itself. The form thus uses structure to quietly create chaos and upend the stability and reassurance of form itself.