Theodore Roethke

 

 

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 hands that held my wrists

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scrapped 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.

 

      In this poem, written in 1948 by Theodore Roethke, at first seems like a gentle memory of a boy and his father. Upon closer analysis however, it takes on a much darker tone. Some suggest that rather than dancing, the child in the poem is being abused by his father. "We romped until the pans / Slid from the kitchen shelf..." could be alluding to the child's father knocking him into counters, while his mother just stands by. another line, "The hands that held my wrists / Was battered on one knuckle..." Suggests that this is not the first time that the boy has been abused by his father. He then recounts that with every step his father misses, his ear is hit with a buckle, more than likely from the father's belt. In the final stanza, the boy recounts that his father hit him on the head with a dirt-caked fist, before "Waltzing" Him off to bed.

     Roethke often wrote poems with darker undertones, often taken from the author's own troubles. During his adulthood, Roethke suffered from Alcoholism and bouts of depression. One poem in which this is depicted, is "In a dark time." written in 1963. "In a dark time, the eyes begin to see, / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; / I hear my echo in the echoing wind- / A lord of nature weeping to a tree. / I live between the heron and the wren, / Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den." This first stanza begins to explore the mental illness that plagued the poet.