Theodore Roethke wrote the poem My Papa’s Waltz in 1942, for a magazine and later put it into one of his books. The story is about the author’s father and was published after his father died of cancer. Roethke’s poem explores the confusing atmosphere and emotion that occurs when a father has a sloppy, drunk dance with his son. The scene of the poem is a complicated show of emotions that a family is sharing. The author used precise language to develop his poem in a concrete and short form. Roethke uses literary devices such as hyperbole, personification, and rhyme to create a ‘struggling family’ theme.

Every other line in the first stanza rhymes to create an unspoken meaning within the poem. The line “the whiskey on your breathe” is rhymed with the line “but I hung on like death” to give the first line its intensity. This first example of rhyming sets up the poem’s structure by creating a double meaning within each stanza. Also in this first stanza the line “could make a small boy dizzy” rhymes with “such waltzing was not easy” to give another unspoken meaning. Easy gives a condition to how a small boy could get dizzy; a small boy could get dizzy easily. Each of these lines in this rhyming device also hold meaning with each preceding line through pure syntax. The literary device in this first stanza sets up the troubled family theme of the poem by clearly stating one of the issues within the family; the father’s drinking.

Hyperbole and personification are introduced in the second stanza, while rhyme continues to play a role in theme development. Roethke uses the second stanza to give a level of intensity to the father’s intoxication through hyperbole. It is safe to assume that the father’s waltzing did not actually cause the pans to slide “from the kitchen shelf” and that this line is an exaggeration because the father would have realized his intoxication and stopped dancing, had the pans actually slid from the shelf where they sat. 

Roethke’s father’s actions in this stanza caused a reaction from his mother. His mother’s reaction is personified when Roethke writes “My mother’s countenance, could not unfrown itself”, because one’s countenance cannot ‘unfrown’ itself. This personification shows that the mother’s expression was unshakeable and her emotions were strongly unchanging. The second stanza’s role in the poem is important because it gives a perspective outside of the two main characters in the poem. It creates an overall more complete image of how this family interacts and lives.  

Rhyming continues to help convey detail within the poem. The two lines, “Slid from the kitchen shelf” and “Could not unfrown itself”, are written to put the mother in the kitchen. The mother may have been placed in the kitchen to portray the family as a typical family since, stereotypically, woman spent most of their time in the kitchen around the time this poem was written.  

The third stanza builds on the condition of this aggressive dance that Roethke has with his father. Roethke describes his father’s knuckles as “battered’. This gives the idea to the reader that his father is a working man or that the father had been in a fight; a fight that would have occurred at a place like a bar. With the father’s drunken state, he misses dancing steps and causes the boy scrape his ear on his father’s belt buckle. The boy continues to dance with these abuses as if they were routine, which points to the fact that this is probably commonplace for an evening in this family. 

Roethke’s rhyming conveys the status of the father in detail. The first and third lines of the third stanza are rhymed to show that the cause of the father’s negligent abuse with his buckle is his tight grip on the boy’s wrist. The other lines of this stanza, “was battered on one knuckle” and “my right ear scraped a buckle”, are rhymed to emphasize the condition of the father as stated in the previous paragraph. The third stanza only overtly utilizes a rhyming mechanism, but still is perhaps the most important stanza because it shows that the father being drunk affects the family physically, as well as emotionally. 

Metaphor and of course rhyme play the largest roles in the closing of this poem. In the opening line of this final stanza, “you beat time on my head”, uses “time” as a metaphor for a watch in order to point out the amount of time for which the two were dancing and to suggest that it is later at night when the young boy should be asleep. The following line, “with a palm caked hard by dirt”, gives additional evidence to the father being a working class or labor worker, who most likely work long harsh hours. “Then waltzed me off to bed” and “still clinging to your shirt”, could be read as metaphors for the seemingly infinite nature of the dance he shared with his father; Roethke’s father did not walk him to bed, his father “waltzed” him to bed with the boy still clung to his father’s shirt. 

Finally, the poem rhymes the two lines “you beat time on my head” and “then waltzed me off to bed” to convey that the boy is probably tired from dancing with his father and he wants nothing more than to lay his head in his bed.

“My Papa’s Waltz”, by Theodore Roethke, is thick with emotional themes about troubled families. Roethke’s powerful stanzas state a situation then, using rhyme schemes, creates a condition for those situations. Through his use of personification, he created a new perspective on the poem. Roethke portrayed a third party view of what was happening through the mother of the boy. Lastly, the use of hyperbole in this poem was used to create intensity and clarify the abuse that was occurring. Hyperbole and personification were used to create and set the stage for the theme of the poem, while the use of rhyme created flow and kept the stanzas concrete as one writing piece.