Roethke My Papas Waltz
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seshollRoethke's "My Papa's Waltz":
A Waltz Macabre
by Eli Merchant
The dread experienced by the child in Theodore Roethke’s poem, “My Papa’s Waltz”
is not immediately apparent, at least not on a first reading, particularly in view of the poem’s
smooth measured cadences, the neutral tone it takes to its narrative material, and the formalism
characterizing its versification. In vain do we look for the prosodic irregularity (as we might
in a Dickinson poem) that would dramatize the inner emotional dissonance and chaos. This
dissociation between experience and affect makes it difficult to read the emotional impact of the
events described in the poem either on the child as they occurred or on the narrator from the
perspective of later years.
The poem is divided into four quatrains, each of which corresponds neatly to each stage
of the narrative, from the moment when the father waltzes with the boy to the point when he
puts him to bed clinging to his shirt. The iambic meter, with three iambs to the line, and the
rhyme scheme abab, where the first and third and second and fourth lines rhyme, are consistently
maintained throughout the poem except for a few terminal unaccented syllables and feminine
rhymes at the end of some of the lines. The syntax is easy to follow, without the caesural breaks,
syntactical convolutions or erratic punctuation that simultaneously bedazzle and befuddle the
Dickinson reader at the edge of conscious thought and rational speech. The imagery is subdued,
with negatives (“Such waltzing was not easy”) and subjunctive mood (“The whiskey on your breath/
Could make a small boy dizzy”) mitigating its impact.1 Yet the impression is hard to avoid that
something traumatic has left a permanent scar on the child’s psyche, as portrayed through sinister
word choices (“hung on like death”), the emphasis on stark physical details, (i.e., the whiskeyed
breath, the battered knuckle), and the compelling need to apostrophize the father (the “you” of the
poem).
The narrative facts are simple and few. The father (“papa”) comes home drunk seemingly
after a hard day’s work and possibly a bout at the bar, and begins the waltz with the son that gives
the poem its title. The dance is erratic as the father lurches and his belt buckle scrapes the son’s
66 Community College Humanities Review
ear, while his palm “caked hard by dirt” beats time on the boy’s head. The dance takes the pair
into the kitchen causing the shelved pans to slide with the mother demonstrating her no uncertain
displeasure, and ends as abruptly as it began when the father waltzes his son off to bed.
What appears to be at play in causing the son’s dread is that the dance represents
a psychological rather than physical assault. Judging by his height (he reaches the father’s belt
buckle), and general helplessness, the son is probably between three and five, an important
stage in his development when he is involved with both parents, develops a sense of masculine
identity, and endeavors to reconcile the masculine and feminine aspects of his identity.2 When
the drunken father dances with him and stimulates him by contact with his bodily parts—the
calloused hands, the whiskeyed breath, the belt buckle
(close to the genital area)—he subverts his son’s
budding manhood, foisting an essentially feminine My Papa's Waltz
identification on him.3 The reference to the kitchen
where the pans are shelved, the mother’s domain, The whiskey on your breath
strategically advances this feminine identification, Could make a small boy dizzy;
symbolically and thematically, particularly in view of But I hung on like death:
the year of the poem’s publication, 1949. The child is Such waltzing was not easy.
being subjected to an excess of erotic stimulation that
overwhelms his psyche and exceeds what his ego can We romped until the pans
sustain, anticipate or cope with. Slid from the kitchen shelf;
What complicates the situation is that on My mother’s countenance
some level, given the fluidity and ambiguity of his Could not unfrown itself.
gender identification, the boy may enjoy the waltz
and the stimulating fatherly attention it involves. The hand that held my wrist
Witness the syntactical change in the second stanza Was battered on one knuckle;
from the second person singular “you” to the first At every step you missed
person plural “we,” reflecting a more active and robust
My right ear scraped a buckle.
collaboration:
You beat time on my head
We romped until the pans
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
Then waltzed me off to bed
Hence the mother’s stern rigid reaction,
Still clinging to your shirt.
whose “countenance could not unfrown itself,”
similarly seared into the narrator’s memory can be
seen from the child’s perspective as a reproach for colluding to displace her in the spousal relation
and usurp her feminine function, undermining the stability of the domestic situation.
Although the poem concludes with the child’s being waltzed off to bed, it is not clear
given the ambiguous meaning of the word “bed” whether this in fact represents the cessation of the
evening’s frenetic actions or their escalation to an even more intensely stimulative level.4
What renders the situation difficult to decode is that it resembles the kind of roughhousing
or horse playing in which many fathers and sons engage.5 But a crucial difference has to be
recognized. The sober father who engages in this activity is conscious of his surroundings and
sensitive to his child’s emotions, and thus he can choreograph the steps within well defined
limits, exercising his parental role and function even during play. Above all, he can demarcate
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the boundary between fantasy and reality, distinguishing a real waltz with its sexual connotation
from an imitation and mockery of one. Such a dance, involving trust, dependency, and mutual
participation, is pleasurable as experience and recollection: It is “easy.”
The situation is totally different in the poem, where the drunken father (“papa”)
demonstrates no control over his stumbling movements or sensitivity to his surroundings. A titular
father defined purely by his physical characteristics, a child in an adult’s body, he is no more able
to distinguish fantasy from reality than his son. As a result, the dance assumes a grim autonomous
existence, gaining momentum at every turn, following a self-determined course to an unpredictable
conclusion, a veritable waltz macabre. Such a dance, to use the narrator’s understatement with
which he seeks to defend himself against the psychic blow, is “not easy.” (l. 4.)
Does the narrative poem, with its understatement, indirectness, negation and even
double negatives (“My mother’s countenance/Could not unfrown itself ”) give us a full or partial
account of the sequence of events, owing its effectiveness to omission rather than inclusion? It
may be instructive at this point to compare the poem to a moving, much anthologized chapter
in Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs, “Discovery of a Father.” Anderson describes how his father,
a compulsive liar, boaster and exhibitionist, a teller of egregious tall tales, who absents himself
from the household for weeks, has practically succeeded in thoroughly alienating his son: “I was
often filled with bitterness,” Anderson tells us, “and sometimes I wished he wasn’t my father.”6
One night his father returns home unexpectedly and tells his son to follow him into the stormy
night. They arrive at a pond where the son is told to strip and get into the water. While the
father’s sudden harsh hortative tone is obviously frightening, particularly as the night is punctuated
by thunder, lightning and rain, the son’s reactions are as understated as in Roethke’s poem. In a
postscript, however, swimming silently side by side with his father he discovers a new side to him:
responsible, serious, sensitive, dependable, powerful, a genuine father he can bond and identify
with, motivating him to becoming a teller of tales in turn. As Anderson writes, “For the first time
I knew that I was the son of my father. He was a story teller as I was to be.” (p. 49)
Parent and child, masculine and feminine, present and future are reunited as they return
from the pond and its baptismal immersion home to the lit snugness of the kitchen and the
mother’s welcoming presence:
There was a lamp lighted in the kitchen and when we came in, the water dripping from us,
there was my mother. She smiled at us. I remember that she called us “boys.” (p. 49)
Roethke’s poem offers us no such postscript. Taking us to the edge of the precipice, the poet
does not indicate what happens afterwards, leaving the reader’s imagination to fill in the lacunae.
Does the poem imitating the waltz in its beat and rhythmic cadences show a successful bonding
and identification with the father, constituting a nostalgic tribute to him and demonstrating the
power of art in mastering instinct and emotion? Or does the poem despite its seeming rhythmic
perfection, narratological simplicity, and posture of innocence, represent an ultimately failed
attempt to exorcise the specter of a childhood experience, taking us to place where art and memory
cannot follow?
It is this rich and complex ambiguity that gives “My Papa’s Waltz” its resonance and
esthetic efficacy, allowing it to deal with the dissonances and contradictions of human experience,
particularly childhood experience, and our responses to them.
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End Notes
1
Theodore Roethke The Last Son, London: John Lehmann, p. 25, l. 4, ll.1-2, respectively.
2
Robert Fliess, Ego and Body Ego, New York, International Press, 1961, in his notes on
Hamlet indicates the conflicting constellations of a child’s masculine and feminine identifications
and their effect on adult development, which may shed light on the psychological dynamics here.
3
It is interesting to note that a study of the work-in-progress papers left by Roethke to
the University of Washington demonstrates a change from “girl” in the first draft to “boy” in the
succeeding one, indicating the ambiguous nature of a child’s gender identification. See John J.
McKenna, “Roethke’s Revisions and the Tone of ‘My Papa’s Waltz,’” ANQ, Spring 98, Vol. 11,
Issue 2, p. 34.
4
If as has been pointed out the word “waltz off” in the last line acquires a meaning different
from its previous one, so the word “bed” could acquire a connotative one fraught with sexual
connotations. See Ronald R. Janssen, “Roethke’s MY PAPA’S WALTZ,” Explicator 44.2 (Winter
86): 43-44.
5
See X.J. Kennedy, An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, 4th ed., Boston, Little
Brown, 1987, p. 51. John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? 2nd ed., Boston, Houghton Mifflin,
1975 takes a different tack and describes the terror infusing the poem’s mood.
6
Sherwood Anderson, Memoirs, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1942, pp. 45-48.
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