The Mood Of My Papa's Waltz By Theodore Roethke

Dissecting Papa and His Waltz Theodore Roethke once proclaimed that “the darkness has its own light,” which seems ‘ato be a statement full of contradiction. Losing his father at a young age and suffering from depression throughout his later years, Roethke’s life was by no means easy. His poetry acted as his outlet and allowed him to see a smidgen of light, even though his life was encompassed by darkness (“Theodore Roethke”). Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz” is an extraordinary example of the light that Roethke was able to find amidst darkness. Roethke accentuated both love and loss through his word choice, the poem’s rhythm and by including figurative language. Born in 1908, Roethke grew up in Saginaw, Michigan and spent much

The olfactory imagery in the first and second lines of the poem gives the reader an immediate sense of what the speaker smelled as he danced with his father. The father of the speaker has consumed so much whiskey that even the scent of his breath was enough to make the speaker dizzy as a young boy (1, 2). As the speaker waltzed with his intoxicated dad, he “hung on like death” simply to avoid being thrown off by his rambunctious father’s romping (3). Roethke uses a simile here to compare the boy clinging onto his father to death. By bringing in the morbidness associated with the word “death” so early on in the poem, Roethke creates a darkness that lingers behind the apparent happiness of the speaker’s memory. The visual imagery Roethke uses to describe the father’s hand that was “battered on one knuckle” and his palms that were “caked hard by dirt” gives the reader an idea that the father has come home from a long day of strenuous work (10, 14). After a hard day of physical labor, the father comes home to drink, but he also makes sure to spend time with his son before the day is over. This obvious effort that the father puts in to be with his son shows just how much he truly loves him. In the final two lines of the poem, Roethke wrote “Then waltzed me off to bed/ Still clinging to your shirt” (15, 16). The brilliant ending to this poem goes so much deeper than just a dad putting his child down to sleep for the night. The memory ends with the speaker clinging to his father’s shirt, like if he were to let go of his father, he may never see him again. Roethke’s concluding sentence of his poem makes the memory seem like a dream, and the child clings onto his father because he knows that it is nothing more than a dream. The child knows that when he wakes up from this dream he will be faced with the harsh reality