english literature homework

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Works Cited Fong, Bobby. “Roethke’s `My Papa’s Waltz’.” College Literature, vol. 17, no. 1, Feb. 1990, p. 78.

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Section:

NOTES & DISCUSSION

ROETHKE'S "MY PAPA'S WALTZ"

Most recent critics of Theodore Roethke's work give "My Papa's Waltz" short shrift. If mentioned

at all, it is characterized as depicting the father's "mixture of tenderness and brutality" and the

child's "admiration and fear."[ 1] The waltz is at once a "happy and terrifying activity" that,

biographically, reflects "Roethke's vacillation toward his father, registering playful but poignant

tones in stanzas of iambic trimeter."[ 2]

Some of my students are able to perceive the poem as thus holding fear and joy in tension, but

mainly these are the ones who see the poem dispassionately, as a play of words on the page

where waltzing and romped are juxtaposed with battered and scraped and beat, where the child

is "waltzed off to bed" holding on "like death." The others, however, divide into two camps,

united by their common insistence that one emotion predominates, either fear or joy.

One party's interpretation accords with that of X. J. Kennedy, who argues:

Most readers find the speaker's attitude toward his father affectionate, and take this recollection

of childhood to be a happy one. But at least one reader, concentrating on certain details, once

wrote: "Roethke expresses his resentment for his father, a drunken brute with dirty hands and a

whiskey breath who carelessly hurt the child's ear and manhandled him." Although this reader

accurately noticed some of the events in the poem and perceived that in the son's hanging on to

the father "like death" there is something desperate, he missed the tone of the poem and so

misunderstood it altogether. Among other things, this reader didn't notice the rollicking rhythms

of the poem; the playfulness of a rime like dizzy and easy; the joyful suggestions of the words

waltz, waltzing, and romped. Probably the reader didn't stop to visualize this scene in all its

comedy, with kitchen pans falling and the father happily using his son's head for a drum. Nor did

he stop to feel the suggestions in the last line, with the boy still clinging with persistent love.[ 3]

Students espousing this reading have noted that their own fathers were reserved when sober,

and that some of their fondest moments were when "papa" became tipsy enough so that

exuberance and love could slip through. This "papa" wasn't the man they knew, so there was

some anxiety felt regarding the "stranger," but he was what these students as children wanted

more often from their fathers.

By contrast, the other side's response is captured by John Ciardi, who argues:

Despite its seeming lightness, "My Papa's Waltz" is a poem of terror, all the more terrible

because the boy is frightened and hurt by the father, even in play. "We romped," the poet says,

but the romp is a dizzying succession of painful glimpses; the house is shaking, the mother is

frowning, the father's hand is scarred by violence, every misstep in the dance scrapes the

father's belt buckle painfully across the boy's ear, and the boy's head is being pounded by that

huge, hard palm. It is a romp, but the boy must cling like death until he is finally dumped into

bed.[ 4]

For these students, alcohol is invariably associated with violence, and the mention of whiskey

on the breath calls to mind incidents when their fathers came home drunk and "romped" with the

family. What was "fun" for the father, however, was fearful for mother and children. These

readers see the waltz image and the rhythm of the poem as ironic counterpoints to the

stumbling brutality of a man who hurts even when he doesn't mean to. A more extreme reading

of the poem takes the waltz entirely as a euphemism for the father beating the child. The child

struggles to hold the father, to make him stop, and they lurch around the kitchen to the mother's

discountenance. This "waltzing was not easy," students have testified from hard experience.

The poem is like a seesaw, where the elements of joy (the figure of the waltz, the playful

rhymes, the rhythm), are balanced against the elements of fear (predominantly the effects of

diction such as whiskey, dizzy, death, unfrown, battered, knuckle, scraped, buckle, beat, hard,

dirt, clinging). The ambivalence of feeling extends to the narrative stance of the speaker. As a

student recently noted, the speaker is remembering an incident of childhood, and if the child

shared in the father's joy, the adult has learned to understand the mother's disapproval, for the

adult stands with the mother, observing.

The "preferred reading" among these interpretations is not a simple matter of appealing to the

text. The New Criticism, with its focus on ambiguity, figurative language, and irony, has not

resulted in the narrowing of interpretive possibilities, but rather has provided tools to account for

a poem's elements in a variety of ways and has proliferated interpretations. In the present case,

those who maintain a balance between joy and fear in the poem give equal weight to both

emotions. Those who see the joy in the poem 8 the diction of violence. And those who see the

fear treat the figure and rhythm of the waltz ironically. A seesaw tips easily, and "My Papa's

Waltz" is susceptible to the pressure of personal experience.

This is not to say that one's personal experience must always be privileged in reading a poem.

Following the lead of H. R. Swardson in "The Use of the Word Mistake in the Teaching of

Poetry," there are no hippopotamuses in "My Papa's Waltz." As Swardson puts it, "the student

who sees a hippopotamus there has made a mistake. I will say that interpretive communities

who see a hippopotamus there have, en masse, made a mistake."[ 5] What I have reported of

my students is recurring patterns of interpretation that, in my estimation, account for the various

elements of the poem in coherent but different ways. The words of a poem create a series of

filters that eliminate possible meanings. In the universe of possible readings, comparatively few

precipitate through all the filters. But in a poem like "My Papa's Waltz," several different

readings do succeed in making their way through. At that point, the "preferred reading" is not

found in the text, but in the interaction of reader and text. Students are not disembodied

intelligences; rather, they bring to the text distinctive pasts that comprise additional filters

screening out possible readings. This essay is a field report on that last set of filters.

At a recent conference, I learned that the poem is used in Jungian psychotherapy to treat

alcoholics. W. D. Snodgrass writes that in The Lost Son and Other Poems, of which "My Papa's

Waltz" was one, Roethke "regressed into areas of the psyche where the powerful thoughts and

feelings of the child---the raw materials and driving power of our later lives--remain under the

layers of rationale and of civilized purpose."[ 6] The achievement of "My Papa's Waltz" is that it

permits readers to access such potent memories in their own lives in ways consistent with the

words and construction of the poem.

NOTES

[1] Karl Malkoff, Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1966) 3, 57.

[2] See William V. Davis, "Fishing An Old Wound: Theodore Roethke's Search for Sonship,"

Antigonish Review 20 (1974): 33; and Walter B. Kalaidjian, Understanding Theodore Roethke

(Columbia University of South Carolina Press, 1987) 51.

[3] X. J. Kennedy, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, 4th ed. (Boston:

Little, Brown, 1987) 421.

[4] John Ciardi and Miller Williams, How Does a Poem Mean? 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1975) 369.

[5] H. R. Swardson, "The Use of the Word Mistake in the Teaching of Poetry." ADE Bulletin 91

(Winter 1988): 4-5.

[6] W. D. Snodgrass, "That Anguish of Concreteness--Theodore Roethke's Career," Theodore

Roethke: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Arnold Stein (Seattle: University of Washington Press,

1965) 81.

~~~~~~~~

by Bobby Fong