My Papa's Waltz Literary Devices

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The poem "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke's has a rhyme to it and repetition of words to illustrate a child's life. As well, the tone is happy and dark while talking about the child spending time with his father. The repetition of happy words is waltz and romped which shows his enjoyment with his father. The darkness that comes with the poem is he would get hurt in the interactions with him "The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle " even through this the child was happy to be with him. The four stanzas it has is not much but each line contains rhyme to keep the reader up on its toes.

The music that I listened to showed how the poem starts slow and then gets suspenseful because of the child being clingy to the father for his attention. The father is an alcoholic who loves his son but can get out hand because of the alcohol in his system this is shown by the diction in the poem. Roethke is drawing in the readers with the flow of words and illustrating an image in your head to be in the moment such as "With a palm baked hard by dirt." The mother in all this is not happy but is waltzing for her child to be happy to see his father coming home from work. The mother is trying to make the experience for her child …show more content…

It sounds he is getting hurt bad and nobody is doing anything about it because they want the child not to love their parents. They are then covering up the situation with the words waltz and romped because it makes it less obvious to the readers of the abuse the child is really going through. This is point of view many people thing is wrong because they see a hardworking dad coming home from work to spend time with his son. That the dad is just putting the child to bed so he does not have to see him drunk. It can symbolize this but I think the author did good in covering up the true

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