Is there a limit where love goes from being unconditional to nonexistent? Can one make up fond memories from a once traumatic experience? Or could one despise what was thought of as a good memory? Though it can be argued that “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke is a reflection of the author’s bad childhood, there is not enough evidence to conclude with that this is a bad memory at all. By looking at the advanced language used by the author, readers see a speaker that was too young during the events of this poem to understand what he knows now as an adult. At the time of writing, he did not recognize his father's drunken abuse, so the poem portrays the young speaker as loving his father unconditionally despite the violence he experienced. 

Theodore Roethke takes the readers on a ride through his childhood universe by dancing through a poem. Notice the word waltz in the poem’s title, “My Papa’s Waltz.” This word has several different meanings. According to Merriam Webster, waltz is defined as, “a dance in triple time performed by a couple who as a pair turn rhythmically around and around as they progress around the dance floor”.(1) However, waltzing is a verb, and therefore a way of walking. In the last stanza the author writes, “Then waltzed me off to bed” (Roethke, 91). This quote shows the father missing some steps of his waltz. In this poem, waltz refers to the father’s drunken walk. The rhymes, though, in the end of every other sentence (ABAB) create a rhythm which the author recognized as a waltz, in the meaning of the dance. This rhythm throughout the whole poem expresses positive energy, making it easy for the reader to catch up. So how do readers know that the waltz between the little boy and his father is not a dance? If this waltz is not a dance, it leads readers to associate the waltz with the father’s drunken walk.

By looking at the words, “whiskey,” “battered,” “scraped,” “beat” and “dirt,” (90-91) it is easy to argue that the poem is about abuse. None of these words are associated with good childhood memories. Whiskey, which is also known as the devil’s brew is never a good combination with small children. The words and actions people associate with “beat” and “scraped” are likely to be violence, physical abuse or pain. In a setting with a small boy and his parents, violence and pain caused by the father’s actions do not tell a happy childhood story. By looking at the stanza, “At every step you missed. My right ear scraped a buckle”(91) one can understand that this waltz is not a normal dance. There is a reason why the father missed a step, and it is because he was drunk.

This poem is obviously not written by a small child. There are too many words that a small boy does not know or does not understand. An adult, looking back on his childhood, wrote this text. The author tells the story through the eyes of a very young boy. He does that to show the reader that he is now aware of what his parents initially exposed him to when he was just a child. By telling the story through the young boy’s eyes, he tells the reader that he did not know what was going on then. By looking at the first stanza where the author writes, “But I hung on like death”(90), readers see the small boy hanging on to his dad even though he smells of whiskey. The last stanza in the poem further demonstrates this argument writing, “Still clinging to your shirt”(91).  Both sentences rely on the words the author chooses. He tells a story about a boy who loves his father even though he had been physically abused several times by this man. This feeling is called unconditional love. Whether the boy was aware of the abuse or not, he would have loved him.

We don’t know for sure if this poem is a reflection of Roethkes childhood, but we know for sure that both his father and his uncle died when Theodore was still a teenager. His father suffered from cancer and eventually lost the battle, while his uncle committed suicide. It is no secret that Roethke struggled with mental illness after those incidents, and of course, his literature was affected by it. Cancer can be a result of being an alcoholic, so it’s not unlikely that this is a short version of Roethkes childhood and relationships to his father. The biographical information add further understanding of the poem because, by imagining that people one gets exposed to in the poem actually Roethke and dad can actually see the poem as a "tribute" to an alcoholic deceased father. As the author has now grown up, we see a son who loved his father, although he eventually realized that what he thought was his dad dancing him to bed with a beautiful waltz, proved to be a drunken walk.

What happened in the poem did not affect the small boy at the time it happened, but as the boy got older he started to see what was right and what was wrong. He experienced other teenager’s parents, and became slightly more aware of how a parent should act. When he realized what his dad actually did to him when he was younger, he got upset. This anger might have lead to his mental illness. Even though he cannot forgive his father for physically abusing him, he is still his father. In some way, one can argue that it is better to have a dad, than not to have a dad at all. Looking back on his childhood the author may have thought, “The devil I knew, was better then the devil I didn’t.”
