




“Being a parent means loving your children more than you ever loved yourself” (My Legacy). In “My Papa’s Waltz” and “forgiving my father,” neither author portrayed the parents putting their children before themselves. They are actually really selfish and hurt them physically and emotionally. Even though both poems are about their parent’s abuse in their lives, how they react and the type of abuse is different.  In “My Papa’s Waltz” the narrator tells it from a perspective of a young boy that loves his father very much even though he physically abuses him and actually then blames the mother for his father’s abuse.  Also, the poem is structured very formally. On the other hand, “forgiving my father” is told from an older woman’s perspective, and she blames her parents for putting her in the middle of their financial issues. The poem is also structured informally. Even though both poems have similar stories about abuse by the parents, they are different types of abuse and the narrators react differently, but we can also see how they wanted a personal relationship with their father and how their abuse stayed with them into adulthood. Furthermore, both poems demonstrate that a loving relationship between a father and child is very important.

In “My Papa’s Waltz” there are definite signs of physical abuse towards the boy and, despite that abuse, the boy still loves his father, but detests the mother for doing nothing. From the beginning we can see that the father has an alcohol abuse problem because the narrator says, “The whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy”(Roetheke1-2).Also, even though his father abuses him the narrator says, “But I hung on like death: / Such waltzing was not easy (Roethke 3-4). This shows after all that his father does to hurt him, he will love him no matter what, yet the abuse weighs heavily on him.  The narrator says, “We romped until the pan/ Slid from the kitchen shelf”, this shows how brutal the boy’s father was, because the father beat him and struck him with pans (Roethke 4-5). Also, while the father beat the boy the narrator says “My mother’s countenance/ could not unfrown itself” (Roethke 6-7). The only person he blames for his father’s abuse is his mother because she basically supported the abuse by doing nothing about it. Furthermore, she acts like it would inconvenience her and like it is not her problem. In the third stanza the poem goes back to his father and says, “The hand that held my wrist” (Roethke 8). This shows he is not a very loving father he does not even hold his hand just his wrist. Then he tells us that the hand holding his wrist “Was battered on one knuckle” (Roethke 10). This makes me think that he was so rough on the child that he busted his knuckle. The poem says that the father is the one that messed up all the time by saying, “Every step you missed” (Roethke 11). Sadly, the narrator then says, “My right ear scrapped a buckle” (Roethke 12). Therefore, every time the father messed up, the boy would pay for it. Because of all the abuse the boy says, “You beat time on my head” (Roethke 13). This shows that the boy matured faster because of the abuse, and, therefore, the father took a piece of his childhood away. Lastly, the narrator says, “Then waltzed me off to bed/ still clinging to your shirt” ( Roethke 15-16).Even though that the boy is abused by the father he still clings to his father’s shirt, showing that he still loves him despite the abuse. 

In “forgiving my father” the daughter despises her parents, specifically her father for putting her through his financial struggles, but forgives him in the end. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator talks about it being Friday and it is time for her dad to get paid. She then talks about him like he is nothing to her because she says, “you have stood in my dreams/ like a ghost”. She calls him a ghost like he is dead to her and the only way she sees him is when she is haunted by him in her dreams (Clifton 1-3).  Also, she calls him “old man” showing that she does not care enough about him to even call him dad or father (Clifton 5). Furthermore, the daughter blames the father for her mother dying so early, but she stays around because she wants to be a “good daughter” (Clifton 6-7). Then in stanza two she goes back to saying that there is “no time” left for him and there was really never enough for him, but she calls him “daddy daddy old lecher old liar” (Clifton 8-9).This shows she cares about him, but sees him as an old dirty man. Even after the mother is dead she wishes that her father was rich, so she could take all of it and give it to her mother. She wants him to pay up so bad for all the pain he has put her through (Clifton 10-11). Then the tone of the poem changes and says, “but you were the only son of a needy father, the father of a needy son”, so it is like she is taking some of the blame away from her father and saying he is not fully responsible for his actions because he was raised in an identical household ( Clifton 12-13). The father never gave the mother anything, because every penny he made was gone about as soon as he got it. She said that payday was Friday, but he would also come home “empty any Friday” (Clifton 14-18).Next, she says, “you were each other’s bad bargains not mine (Clifton 19).This is where we see she also puts some blame on the mother for her pain. She calls her “daddy” an “old pauper old prisoner old dead man” and afterwards asks herself “what am i still doing here collecting” (Clifton 20- 21). She loves her dad, but still sees him as an awful man, but then asks herself why is she continues to think about all the awful financial situations her parents put her through when they are dead. Lastly, the narrator says, “you lie side by side in debtors’ boxes and no accounting will open them up (Clifton 22-23). I interpreted this as the daughter putting all the emotional abuse her father caused her behind her and forgiving him because she did not want to have to deal with his image haunting her anymore. Even though both poems are pretty similar in their stories about being abused, they are very different (how?). 

Although both poems deal with the narrators being abused one way they are different is their structure. For example, “My Papa’s Waltz” is structured very formally. It has four stanzas and each stanza is a quatrain and has iambic trimeter, this means that it has three stressed syllables in every line. This makes the poem a little more bearable, even though it is talking about abuse of a child, by making it seem like the beatings of the boy are him and his father dancing around the kitchen or off to bed. On the contrary, “forgiving my father” is very informal. Unlike most of literature the poem capitalizes nothing with no rhyme or meter, making it seem like it was more of a note. Writing the poem more informally made it more personal and made me think it was a note to her father telling him she forgives him. That’s why it was written so informally because it was intended for only her eyes. The poems are structured very differently, and so are other aspects of the poem.

Another way the poems were different were the types of abuse they endured and the perspective from which they were told. In “My Papa’s Waltz” the author wrote the poem from a young boy’s perspective. We can see this because when the boy talks about his father alcohol problem, the narrator says his breathe “could make a small boy dizzy (Roethke1-2). Also, the narrator talks about his father taking him to bed (Roethke 15). This shows that he was a young boy telling the story because a grown man would not be taken off to bed by his father. Also, “In My Papa’s Waltz” the boy went through physical abuse from his father. The narrator tells about the father beating him in the kitchen until the pans fell off the wall and every time the boy’s father messed up he would be blamed and beaten (Roethke 5-6,11-12). However, in “forgiving my father” the poem is written from the perspective of an older woman. We can see this because she is writing about the past. For example, both of her parents are dead now, and her father is now just a ghost that haunts her (Clifton 3-4).Also, the nattator tells everything as if it was in the past and is still burdened with everything her father put her through. Furthermore, the type of abuse in “forgiving my father” is emotional abuse. Her father never had enough money to give the family; this made her mother and father fight (Clifton17-19). Then she never got the love she needed from her father because of his selfishness and his disconnectedness from the family. Also, because of her father’s financial issues she blames him for her mother’s death, which may have been medical because she says “early death” (Clifton 6). Her father never took time to get to know his daughter and never provided anything she or her mother needed, which ultimately hurt her and scarred her for life. Both children are abused, just in different ways, and act very differently in response to their abuse. 

In both poems the children were abused, but they react so differently to the abuse their fathers put them through. In “My Papa’s Waltz” the boy still “clings to his father’s shirt” even after all the beating he had taken from his father (Roethke 16).  The narrator says, “He hung on like death” showing that he will love his father no matter what he does until he dies (Roethke3).Furthermore, instead of blaming the father for all the beating, the boy puts the blame on his mother(Roethke 7-8). He does this because his mother never once stopped his father from beating him, just frowned when they knocked pans off the wall, like he disrupted her own personal problems. On the other hand, in “forgiving my father” she primarily blames her father, but puts some blame on her mother (Clifton 19). At the beginning of the poem the daughter talks about how her father is dead to her and cannot even get away from him in her dreams (Clifton 3). She even blames him for her mother’s death saying she was taken too soon (Clifton 6). Also, she calls him a dirty old man and wishes that he was rich so she could take it all away like he had taken her childhood away ( Clifton 9-11). It is safe to say she despises him and wants him to feel the way she does, but near the end of stanza two realizes he is not fully to blame. She blames it on her father’s father because he was the same way and never provided for his family (Clifton 12-13). Then, she also blames some of it on her mother because she got caught between their feuds, but in the end she forgives her parents because she did not want to deal with her parents’ problems anymore (Clifton 19-23).Even though they react so differently, both narrators wanted one thing, and this was for their fathers to love them and get to know them.

From interpreting these poems I can see how the children being abused craved a loving relationship with their father and how it affected them if they did not. The boy from “My Papa’s Waltz” says that he will love his father until he dies no matter how many times he beats him. All the boy wanted from his father was love, so he endured all the abuse. It is sad to say, but he never got to know what a loving father was and now he will also only know how to be an abusive father. In “forgiving my father” all she wanted from her father was to pay for everything he did to her. She was angry at one point and then sees that her father is the way he is because his father treated him the same way (Clifton 12-13). Yet again this shows that a father’s relationship with their child is important for teaching them to be good parents. This does not mean she does not blame her father for her difficult life, but she does forgive him and only does it so she does not constantly thinking about how her father was never there for her. Both children were abused and are now adults writing about the abuse their fathers caused them. We can see they are still hurt by the lack of a loving father because they still reminisce on memories with him. Their abuse was for a short while, but the effects stayed with them a lifetime.

“My Papa’s Waltz” and “forgiving my father” are very similar in that they are both about abuse and how it affected them, but the poems’ structures and the narrators’ reactions to the abuse were different. Even though the boy and daughter reacted differently, the effects were the same. Their childhoods were ruined by their fathers’ abuse, which stuck with them into adulthood. They thought about their fathers the entire time and craved a loving relationship with them. Neither of them ever got that loving relationship with their father, but the boy still loved his father anyways and the daughter forgave her father after a long time of despising him. They will always remember the pain their fathers put them through, which will affect them the rest of their lives.

 




