
What is love? Love can be a very contradictory emotion or state of being. In Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”, love is a wide range of emotions from good to bad. To the writer reflecting on his childhood, his love is both confident but fearful, healthy yet toxic, hopeful yet pessimistic, mature but naïve. Love is a relationship an inevitably all relationships have two sides. Roethke writes about both the positive and negative aspects love has, for both himself and his father. This paper will uncover the ugly and beautiful truths behind the fragile “L” world and how family has such a prodigious impact on this emotion. By looking at “My Papa’s Waltz”, we can see the wide variety of consequences that comes hand in hand with love, which most people do not see, and this is important because it shows how love can both harm and provide for people.

With idolization comes self-reflection. If you idolize someone, what’s his or hers also becomes yours. This is very common with love: feeling the consequences of other’s actions. The author’s adoration for his father subjects him to this harmful quality of affection. He explains that, “at every step [his father] missed/His right ear scraped a buckle” (Roethke11-12). Taken out of the dancing context, at all of his father’s mishaps, Roethke directly felt the effects. Whether this be if his father wasn’t making enough money to support his family or he was never sober enough to care for his family, he was hurting Roethke. Unfortunately, hurt in this relationship is likely both verbal and physical. Roethke explains how his father, “beat time on [his] head/With a palm caked by dirt” (13-14). This image shows the physical detrimental aspects of his relationship with his father. Roethke is too young to understand that this is an abusive relationship and he does not want to accept this, as he longs for that encouraging father figure in his life. 

Love is arguably the most blinding emotion one can have. It is easy to adhere to “selective” tendencies when dealing with one you love. Reflecting on his childhood through poetry, Roethke realizes how love blinded him from fully accepting his father’s flaws. Roethke described how, “The whiskey on [his] breath/Could make a small boy dizzy” (1-2).  As a reader, we can understand that this means his father was intoxicated, but it is very likely that Roethke would not understand this at the time. As he continues on, he describes this “dance” his father would do, calling it the waltz or the romp. As a young and naïve boy, he interpreted this drunk stagger as some sort of dance his father was doing, as he always saw his father in a bright light, which is something many young boys do. Yet, this was not a dance, which was clear to his mother as, “[her] countenance/Could not unfrown itself” (7-8). Roethke is a young boy in this time of his life, so he cannot grasp what is going on. He has hope in his father, confident that he will protect him and love him how a father should.

On the bright side, with love comes hope and trust. These are two of the most beautiful things about love. Despite the hardships the reader and the future Roethke can see exists in their relationship, as a young boy he still trusts and adores his dad. During his father’s drunken wobble he says that, “[he] hung on like death/” for, “such waltzing was not easy” (3-4). Even in times of pain and fear, he relied on his dad. He tries to pull his father closer, as his father keeps pushing himself farther away. Another time where we can see this reliance is directly following the lines that hint towards his father being physically abusive towards him. He writes how after this altercation his father then, “waltzed [him] off to bed/Still clinging to [his father’s] shirt” (15-16).  Roethke longs for his father to come around. He has hope that his father will treat him the right way. This is a remarkable thing because hope is the belief that things can and will get better. And without hope nobody can succeed or have the power to change. As a young boy, he clings to this hope physically by not letting go of his father, as well as the idea of his father being a good one. 

As humans, we set expectations. We expect our parents to take care of us, we expect our parents to be trustworthy, and we expect those we love to love us back. Love is a beautiful thing, it’s so complex yet so raw and simple. As humans, it is common to hold onto things that are toxic for you, even when they don’t quite meet our expectations. It is not uncommon to be blindsided from seeing these flaws or warning sides, as love is so powerful it has the ability to cover these things. As you can see, this consuming emotion of love can be both good and bad for people. However, we can run away from love because it has the capability of destruction, or we can accept it and cling on to the hope that it will all work out. 