ken whims and his mother's quiet resignation. The third stanza paints a picture of the poet's admiration for his father as he recalls, "The hand that held my wrist/ Was battered on one knuckle" (Roethke 9-10). This line also implies that the father is a hard working man. At the end of this stanza, we are shown just how defenseless the child is as his father drags him around the room. Unable to control the waltz, he can barely keep up with his father's overpowering pace: "at every step he missed," he explains his own "right ear scraped a buckle" (Roethke 12). The most important statement that the speaker makes is in the last line of his poem, "...waltzed me off to
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