In, “My Papa’s Waltz”, Theodore Roethke expresses the love for his father despite his actions with the use of Diction, Imagery, Ethos, and Intensifying context. Roethke does a great job of showing the love between him and his fatherbut also expresses the strength it took to deal with his actions and his lifestyle. Writing this poem as an adult and reminiscing on this memory also gives the audience a chance to re-read the poem and look at it at a different perspective. 

Roethke effectively describes his childhood memory by gradually strengthening his diction and rhyme scheme throughout the poem. Roethke starts the poem by introducing whiskey into the first line. The title, “My Papa’s Waltz”, now has a negative connotation to it. By simply adding whiskey to the first line, he opens the eyes to the readers creating a visual image that, “Papa’s Waltz”, may be deeper than the average waltz. The second line, “Could make a small boy dizzy”, refers to Roethke himself as a small child (line 2, Roethke). He then follows with, “But I hung on like death: Such Waltzing was not easy” (lines 3-4). These lines portray the waltzing getting more aggressive and hard to keep up with. This waltzing might initially seem as if it just a drunken stumble by Roethke’s father, but is actually referring to the father-son relationship and Roethke’s father’s lifestyle. Being an innocent child, his father’s actions are not seen in the same way that his mother sees them. “My mother’s countenance could not unfrown itself” (lines 7-8). His mother knew what was really happening and was aware at the time that he was intoxicated and was displeased with how aggressive and clumsy he was being.  Between the love for his father and his innocence, Roethke clings on through the roughness while his mother sees it in a more mature manner and cannot hang on as he does. The poem has an ABAB rhyme scheme but contained in the first two stanzas are slant rhymes. Slant rhymes are words that are very close to rhyming but actually do not. The rest of the stanzas consist of strong rhyming words. As the rhyming becomes more sharp, so does the diction in the poem. The diction Roethke uses in the last two stanzas makes the reader visualize the events going on with Roethke and his father getting more intense and aggressive. These stanzas contain words such as, battered, scraped, beat. “At every step you missed my right ear scraped a buckle” (lines 11-12). Roethke is not literally saying that his ear scraped a buckle, but uses this metaphor to express that it is progressively getting harder to handle his father’s actions and is now getting blamed for mishaps that his father runs into or creates. The last stanza ends with, “Then waltzed me off to bed still clinging to your shirt” (lines 15-16). This single line portrays Roethke’s whole childhood memory in one big picture. Even through all the drunken actions of his father, He still hung on despite how difficult it was. Roethke did a great job of gradually intensifying the events and actions of his father. Then even at the peak of the Waltzing, Roethke showed his love for his father by still clinging to his shirt after being brought to bed.

As a child we are innocent and unaware of all of the events that happen around us. I personally remember events experienced as a child that were severely different when looked back on as I grew older. Roethke establishes an appeal to ethos by speaking from a child’s point of view with an adult understanding. He appeals to any of the readers who have shared the same experience with a family member as a child. After a first reading, one could see this story as literally waltzing. Only with deeper thinking into the diction and context can one spot out that this is a memory of a drunken father who blames failure on his son and is overly aggressive with him. The waltzing is his way of a child to blur out the reality of his father’s drunken actions. Roethke also refers to his father as Papa instead of father at an attempt to throw out reality and just love his father unconditionally. By using Papa, it shows that Roethke does not just look at him as a regular father, but that they share a closer bond to one another. Many children who experience abuse do not like to admit it or acknowledge that there is a problem at home. Even with Roethke not fully saying or describing that he was abused the reader can still predict that there was abuse through the aggressive use of metaphors and verbs that Roethke uses. This hiding of the abuse appeals to the people who have had a hard time admitting to being abused. By using waltz as the cover up, the reader is able to read the poem without having a hard time at how aggressive it would be if the word was replaced by the true action. The waltzing off to bed by Roethke’s father shows that this is not just a once in a time event. This shows that this has been a reoccurring event and that Roethke refers to it as a waltz because that is the only way that he wants to see it. It also suggests that this waltz is not an action done between the two of them but merely an action that is done to Roethke. As a reader we can put ourselves either in the perspective of Roethke as a child and see his confusion of his father’s drunken actions and understand why he refers to it as a waltz or we can see it in an adult’s perspective of how Roethke’s father really is and the reality of his actions. The innocence of Roethke as a child expresses the urge for him to hold on because it is the only thing he can do. His father expresses dominance over him and being a naive child to his actions, the child only looks at him with unconditional love. Readers that have had a rough relationship with their fathers’ in the past are able to relate to this passage and feel it on a deeper level that the average reader. Only does Roethke now know what the true waltzing was and all what his father was truly doing. 

The tone of this poem is light and reminiscent, but it’s the undertone that reaches out to the reader the most. Under the nostalgic tone lies the reality of the situation. The situation that is not seen in the eyes of Roethke as a child but as Roethke as he writes this. The imagery corresponds with this undertone and portrays an imagine that we can see from a non-child perspective. “We romped until the pans slid from the kitchen shelf” (lines 5-6). These lines suggest that Roethke’s father was being way too rough after drinking, stumbling and being aggressive while knocking over everything. Roethke states, “You beat time on my head with a palm caked hard by dirt” (lines 13-14). This line isn’t stating that Roethke is getting physically abused but suggested that Roethke is feeling the pain in more of a mental way. With his hands being caked by dirt we lean towards the idea that Roethke’s father is an outdoors man or a hard worker but the imagery that we see when reading this line brings out a feeling of violence. “The hand that held my wrist was battered on one knuckle” (lines 9-10). When visualizing a waltz, we would assume the dancing would proceed with holding hands with one another. This line creates a tense scene in that the holding of the wrists is a sign of aggression and anger. The holding of the wrists would not be as compelling if Roethke did not add the word battered. The descriptive imagery throughout the poem brings the reader into the reality of Roethke’s difficulty with hanging on to his father. 

This poem is short but Roethke does a significant job at showing his theme through intensifying context, an appeal to ethos, imagery, and vivid diction to put the reader into the memory and allow them to feel the same emotions as he did while going through all of this. The vivid imagery allows the reader to think back to their childhood days and think if any experiences seem different now then as they did in the past. The sharp and strong diction allows the reader to feel the power that Roethke’s father has over him. Roethke’s appeal to ethos correlates to both of these which creates a credibility for him to relate to any other person that has experienced an event like this. When initially looking at the title of this poem, “My Papa’s Waltz”, the reader could imagine a reminiscent story about the authors childhood and how him and his father used to happily dance their way through life. Roethke wants to look at it like that is how it was, but the underlying message hidden beneath the figurative language shows that this is not how the past truly was. The violent verbs that Roethke uses single handedly show that there was more to the story then what was first interpreted. The main symbol in this poem, the waltz, served its purpose to show how the relationship between Roethke and his father truly was. Even though the waltz, or Roethke’s relationship with his father, got progressively harder and more difficult to keep up with, Roethke stayed strong because he loved his father. That is the true theme to this poem. That no matter how hard things became with his father, the unconditional love that Roethke shared with his father forced him to keep waltzing. 
