
Both Forgiving My Father  by Lucille Clifton and My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke emphasize fathers being directly and indirectly abusive towards their children as a way of obtaining power in the house and in their lives. Through careful analysis of each text, I will compare and contrast the pieces and explain how certain elements from each work affirm and better complement the other. My analyses includes the identification the reoccurring themes and similarities found in each text, what each theme conveys in each work, how the themes are shown in each work, and lastly, how these themes’ contents and deliveries help me broaden my comprehension of the works. Sylvia Plath’s Daddy and Mary Oliver’s The Journey were secondary sources I used to further my understanding.

The reoccurring themes found in My Papa’s Waltz and Forgiving My Father are all based upon the fact that how a child’s perspective of their parents can be determined by how the father treats the child, the mother, and himself. The first theme is the simplest one: the father is belittling, derogatory, and defamatory to his family members. Both of these pieces show unstable characteristics in a domestically abusive home. Harsh language and actions that the father inflicts on himself and his loved ones create a tense and strained feeling in their homes. My Papa’s Waltz is from the point of view of a young boy, most likely under the age of 10.  The child is clearly physically abused by his father, with multiple lines in the poem implying that his father beats him regularly. Lines 9 and 10 state, “The hand that held my wrist, / Was battered on one knuckle,” which is evident of the father using his hands to batter his child when the child was doing something even deemed remotely incorrect by the father. Line 13 points out that this happened on a timely occurrence and that the father “regularly beat time on [the child’s] head.” The physically abuse was fed by the father’s alcoholism, shown with the “whiskey on [his] breath” (line 1). Forgiving My Father shows the unstable domestic relationship characteristic of emotional mental abuse inflicted on his daughter through the marital abuse on the child’s mother. The third and fourth lines hint that the father’s being and presence haunt her “like a ghost” and invade her dreams like nightmares. This leads to the second reoccurring theme that a major effect on a child’s relationship with their father can alter their perceptions based on the father’s actions on their children’s mental and physical states. My Papa’s Waltz shows this in the third stanza and thirteenth line. They convey the boy’s fear of his father and by the author describing the waltz as being so forceful and unpleasant, it shows that the father is much bigger than his child, this creating an overpowering, overwhelming emotion within the child. Forgiving My Father shows this in lines 6, 7, and 10-18. The sixth and seventh lines mention the daughter’s late mother in an eerie sense by creating an image of the young girl standing over her mother’s graveside, which was apparently made due to the father’s actions. Lines 10-18 show the hatred this little girl has for her father because she is very aware that it is her father’s greed for money that caused him to physically abuse her mother, which, in turn, mentally abused her child as well. The last reoccurring theme found in both works is enhanced by the previous two. The main providers and beneficiaries of families are stereotypically the fathers, and both of these works show how the main provider of their home has an unconceivable selfishness about himself. My Papa’s Waltz uses words that are warnings that the father is an alcoholic. “Whiskey,”  and how much it makes “a small boy dizzy,” and how “such waltzing was not easy” for the child gives the reader a sense of discomfort in the child’s home life and just how stable the father is to raise him. Forgiving My Father’s implication of gluttony is that of monetary avarice. As early as the second line states the word “bills,” with mentions of how much the daughter wishes that the cheap father was rich just show she could disempower him by taking it all away from him. She wants to do this as vengeance for him taking away her mother. It is not until the end of the poem that it becomes evident that his piggish qualities put him in the grave as well and that she forgives him for his abuse as a means of her respecting her mother.   

My Papa’s Waltz helps me understand these themes. The boy’s love for his father despite being spiteful of him simultaneously is reflected in Forgiving My Father’s little girl’s feelings of love for her abusive father. The boy’s love is still evident for his father because even through the abuse, the boy has an emotional attachment to his father, albeit it being an unhealthy attachment. The little girl’s reasoning for forgiving her father for the traumas he put his family through were not clear to me until I understood the interpretation that the child loves his father deep down. In Forgiving My Father, the girl’s hatred for her father helps me discern the boy’s malice for his father. She hates her father for the physical and mental traumas he descended on his family because they show that he was egotistical. This relates to the boys abuse because both were abused due to the fathers’ lust for power.  His monetary greed that he inflicted on the girl’s mother is shown in lines 5 and 6, “but today is payday, payday old man, / my mother’s hand opens in her early grave.” By stating that her mother was put into her grave early, it suggests that the father put her there, much to the misery of his child. As stated in the previous paragraph, the third stanza and thirteenth line show the forcefulness of the waltz and how it overwhelms the child. The father has control of his child by having his child be afraid of him. This feeds into his father’s greed for power. This was not clear to me until comparing and analyzing each text. 

The ambiguous way the poem can be interpreted helps me understand the themes in Forgiving My Father because the children’s emotions in each poem is explained by the fathers’ greediness. Forgiving My Father is written with the ironic twist of the traumatic themes compared to the title. The title implies that the poem will be about someone being positive and openhearted in forgiving their parent when it is actually focusing on negative qualities in the relationship and ends with the child forgiving her father as a way of respecting herself and her late mother.  The way each piece was written to be interpreted emphasized these themes as well and made each text clearly accentuate the themes in the other. My Papa’s Waltz was written ambiguously. The poem can be interpreted in two ways, both from the child’s point of view with his emotions and also from the father’s point of view with his inflictions. 

Sylvia Plath’s Daddy aids in my comprehension of the works because it is about a child being spiteful of their father and being too afraid of him to even breathe or sneeze. Mary Oliver’s The Journey does the same because it emphasizes being stuck in an “environment so large,” which helps me understand the works because while the children are so scared of doing something wrong, like in My Papa’s Waltz, they also feel lost and isolated, like in Forgiving My Father. 

Two fascinating points in each poem that made me interested in them are fascinating. Growing up in a home that was filled with love and respect from and for everyone in the family, learning about these relationships that people have with their fathers was eye-opening and unexpectedly captivating. The other interesting point was learning how poems can be written to show how the relationships between a father and child, a mother and father, and a mother and child are different based on the point of view in which the theme is being conveyed from. 