Relationsips with Fathers
             The narrator of My Papa's Waltz Theodore Roethke discusses a very heartbreaking and distressful situation when looking back at his childhood remembering a scene (perhaps one frequently enacted) where he and his drunken father waltz wildly through the house. An interpretation of "My Papa's Waltz" takes into account the complexity of what the speaker feels that are bought about by the father. A dance is supposed to bring two people closer but here it has a darker side to it that makes one realize the powerfully unsettling emotion under the surface of the poem. Theodore Roethke manipulates our emotional response to the poem through a number of literary conventions, some of which play on the conventions of a waltz. The speaker sets a picture by establishing frightening images followed by some comforting ones. The speaker begins a sort of perturbing image "The whiskey on your breathcould make a small boy dizzy". By this line one can imagine the little boys plight of having to go along with this waltz.
             The second stanza begins with words "We romped until the pans/slid from the kitchen shelf". Although delight in the romp are obvious those feelings are shadowed by an undercurrent of tension that are captured in some of the words "Hung on like death"(3); "such a waltz was not easy"(4); "You beat time on my head"(13); "clinging to your shirt"(16). In this poem we can say that the father apparently works hard all day but instead of hurrying home to his wife and child he stops by a bar and gets drunk. The image of his "palm caked hard by dirt"(14) indicates not only that he works hard, but that he hasn't stopped by the house to get cleaned up before heading ton the bar .Another fact could be revealed that "The hand that held his son's wrist/was battered on one knuc...