20 pages • 40 minutes read
Theodore RoethkeMy Papa's Waltz
Theodore RoethkeFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1942A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Waltz
The impromptu dance the father and son execute in the kitchen symbolizes both the yearning to communicate and the failure to achieve meaningful communication between the boy and his father. The father is intoxicated, coming home late, presumably, from another night in a bar. The mother and son have waited up for him, and the father uses the effort to dance with his son as a way to bond with the boy. The effort, if well-intentioned, ends up with the father in his own whirling world and the son longing for the security and retreat of his bed.
Drawing on Roethke’s German roots, the waltz is a precise, tightly choreographed dance. The steps are timed and careful. When the dance collapses into furious chaos, the two spinning in careless circles, this reflects the larger inability of the father to communicate with his young son. The closer the father draws the boy to him physically, the more distant the boy is emotionally. What starts as a romp, an escapade between a father and his naïve and trusting son, quickly spirals into a taut and anxious contest of wills, the father exerting a defined advantage through his sheer physical presence. The waltz should express the communication between two people by fusing them into a single energy, but here it becomes a domination/subjugation dynamic. The boy cannot follow the father’s lead: The boy’s feet are too small; it is late; and the father’s movements are at best erratic, at worst, frightening.
The clunky beat the father casually thumps on the boy’s head, if intended to help provide some kind of music to follow, feels more threatening than helpful to the boy. The verb “beat” suggests the latent violence of the gesture and indicates perhaps a history of the father disciplining the son. In the end, the waltz becomes ironic. There is no flow, just the rough and careless lead of the drunk father and the boy, helpless and voiceless, clinging to that father for direction and reassuring presence.
The Kitchen Pans
In a poem about dancing and the waltz, there is oddly no music. The only sound comes from the hard cacophony of the kitchen pans that the dancing twosome send clattering to the floor, symbolizing the anarchy unleased through the father’s drunken behavior. Much as it does in the jarring juxtaposition of the classic waltz with the romp the father and son execute in the kitchen, the poem uses the kitchen pans to suggest the tidiness that the mother presumably created and sustained within the house. Within the typical household of the era, the kitchen was the inviolable domain of the mother. As such, the mother represents that principal of order, that reassuring stability that grows increasingly ironic as the boy whirls about the floor with his father.
In the poem, the mother is helpless to control the havoc created by the sudden invasion of the intoxicated father. She sits passive in the shadows of the kitchen, unable to restrain the father and, perhaps worse, help her son who grows increasingly alarmed as he clings to his father’s shirt and tries to keep up with the frenetic movements. The pans so neatly set on the kitchen shelves then symbolize order lost, the irony of attempting to establish that reassuring sense of organization given the bull-in-the-china-shop presence of the father. The father, despite what might be his best intentions to play with his son before bedtime, upends order. He is the threat of anarchy released.
Papa’s Belt Buckle
The father’s belt buckle—against which the boy’s right ear scrapes as he tries valiantly to match the father’s graceless dance moves—symbolizes the threat of corporal punishment at the hands of a father who loses control when he drinks too much.
The belt buckle, after all, measures the boy’s puniness. He barely reaches his father’s waist, suggesting his fragility and vulnerability. The scraping of his ear against the buckle as the father dances in his own alcohol-induced haze underscores the father’s self-involvement and lack of interest in his son’s well-being. The word “scrape” itself is a painful word to say—it is an aggressive hard vowel and two clipped guttural consonants, the “k” sound and the “p” sound.
Because the poem is limited to the perceptions of the child, the belt buckle might mean more to him than the adult poet cares to share. In a poem that suggests the father’s latent violence and aggression toward his young son, it is possible that the belt buckle has been used for discipline in the past when the father has been drinking. The scraping now encourages the boy to grin and bear it, to do his best not to anger his drunk father or spoil the father’s apparently happy cavorting. That dependency is suggested by the image of the boy “clinging” (Line 16) to his father’s shirt, a gesture of helplessness and misdirected trust that reflects, again perhaps, the son’s distrust of his father’s apparent good will. The question is never answered, but the belt buckle represents the boy’s willingness to endure physical discomfort, even pain, as a strategy to appease a domineering and carelessly aggressive father.
Unlock all 20 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: