Emotional Analysis Of My Papa's Waltz (Roethke

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The abuse of a child tarnishes parents, permanently damages the parent-child relationship, and is completely gratuitous. Everyone has a father and has their own personal feelings towards their father. For some, these experiences are those of affection and gratefulness, however, for others this may be anger and resentment. It is easy to project these experiences onto the poem “My Papa’s Waltz” (Roethke) as the poem is a son’s reminiscence of “waltzing” with his father as a young boy. Furthermore, because the narrator seems isolated, the reader’s perceptions vary throughout the poem. Readers believe it to be a cheerful childhood memory, while another may contend it to be a disclosure of childhood abuse, nevertheless, “My Papa’s Waltz (Roethke)” confirms both perspectives and displays the narrator’s emotions through a poetic tone. …show more content…

Generally, readers either believe the tone is either playful or resentful, although the poem consists of many more facets of tone. In the opening ballad of the poem, “The whisky on your breathe/ Could make a small boy dizzy; (Roethke)” narrates the fathers drunkenness, therefore setting the negative tone to the rest of the poem. “But I hung on like death;/ Such waltzing was not easy. (Roethke)”. There are implications that there is something not a seemingly pleasant memory in the dissonant sounds. The poems rhyming scheme uses assonance, which the rhyming words are not identical such as “dizzy”, and “easy” (Roethke 2, 4). These words have slight imperfections that reflect the narrator’s emotions towards his father. Nevertheless, the boy has unconditional love for his father, that love cannot mask those imperfections. The boy’s father, portrayed as a drunkard, and perhaps that is the reason the poem leads us to believe that this is the reason for

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