'My Papa's Waltz' a poem of abuse?

mcco12
May 14, 2008 at 4:32 PM
5 comments

I was reading this analysis today of a student work that was exploring that well-known poem "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke. What surprised me is that the writer was using the piece to argue about child abuse. I never saw that interpretation in the poem at all. Here is the poem:

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

--Roethke

To me, this poem is simply about a young boy being swept up in his father's drunken exuberance. There may or may not be abuse in this relationship, but I certainly don't see any indication of that in this poem. It seems to be that the narrator is remembering back to when he was a boy and how his father would come home drunk, and they'd dance around the kitchen. But it feels like a sweet memory, if one that is slightly tinged with fear, perhaps.

Yet the writer the student refers to insists that there are all these indications of abuse: the mother's frowning face, the face scraping the buckle, the hand holding the boy's wrist.

Anyway, the last time I spent any time thinking about this poem was about 15 years ago, but I'm just curious if this "abuse" angle is some standard interpretation of the piece nowadays in academia...it'd be a shame if so since I always found this to be a lovely little piece.

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I think I agree with you but I see glimmers of what the student is saying: there's something violent about the imagery/language in this poem. Certainly if it isn't about abuse, there's something aggressive about this dance. But I haven't studied poetry in 10 years so...

[this is good]

I took a poetry course as an undergrad just a couple years ago. We read this poem, and one of my classmates came up with this "abuse" theme as well (which I didn't get from my initial reading, either. the belt buckle scraping the ear sounded to me like a fond remembrance, not a painful one). The professor said that it wasn't at all that sort of thing and it seemed like he'd never come across that interpretation, either, so I wouldn't say that "in academia" the abuse theme is standard. At least not in my academia.

Thanks for writing about this! I needed to read this poem again.

[this is good]

I have read this poem dozens of times and never had that interpretation nor in the many classes where we studied Roethke did abuse ever come up. What I think is interesting is the hyper-awareness that we as a society now have that permeates its way into all sorts of things and places where it may not belong. Up until the last 20 years as a society we were just more physical. Spanking was common when we were young (I had many a wooden spoon broken over my ass and deservedly when I was a kid), rulers on the knuckles, etc. A few knocks and scrapes were more of the norm whereas now we cushion everything and in doing so it entirely changes our perception of many many things in this world. This poem is a prime example. I always thought of it as a loving remembrance, a boy caught up in the exhuberance of his father's coming home. I feel sad now--it will always be colored for me now--I know I'll always think of this conversation when I read the poem in the future, knowing how newer sensibilities tampered with my nostalgia of what it once meant.

Well, I had a college writing class about ten years ago where we used a poetry primer instead of the usual book of essays. After reading "My Papa's Waltz" to us, the professor mentioned how some view it as being about abuse. The arguments he mentioned mostly had to do with Roethke's word choices (e.g., death, battered, beat) and that whiskey was mentioned in the poem. I guess anyone who drinks whiskey is automatically a child abuser to some.

I couldn't see it then, and I still can't now. For the most part, my classmates didn't buy it, either. Though there were a few who could understand how others might make a connection to child abuse, they didn't think the poem was explicitly or implicitly about abuse. Thank goodness for common sense.

I think the connection is based solely on word choice throughout the piece. While I have no idea whether or not this poem is about child abuse, it definitely left me feeling incredibly uneasy after reading it. As poets, you all know that no word is an accident. If words like 'death' and 'battered' are in a poem about waltzing with your father, I'm sure it isn't by mistake.

But still!
I'm not on either side of the fence. It's a memorable and haunting poem, regardless.

'My Papa's Waltz' a poem of abuse?

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