My Papa's Waltz : Theme

Memory

The Lost Son, which was published in 1948, the year Roethke turned forty, is a collection of poems in which the writer examines his childhood and adolescence. “My Papa’s Waltz” looks back at Roethke’s experience as a child, dancing with his now-dead father in the family’s home. The title seems addressed to an audience and refers to the father in the third person, as if to say, “Here is a poem about my father and a dance he used to do with me.” The poem itself, however, is a first-person account directed by a child to his father. This distinction corresponds to a division between Theodore Roethke the objective observer of the past, the poet who records the experience and labels it (gives it a title), and Theodore Roethke the child who subjectively experiences the dance and speaks to his still-living father.

The poem is permeated by the child’s sense of his own smallness and weakness in comparison to his father. A “small boy” made “dizzy” by the alcohol on his father’s breath and scraped by the father’s belt buckle, the child found that waltzing with this parent “was not easy.” He was buffeted by the force of his father’s movements, and it was all he could do to simply hang on. These are vivid details, richly evocative of the boy’s sense of inferiority to his powerful father. Even the phrase “waltzed me off to bed” expresses the disparity in strength between the two. It suggests that the dancing was not an activity that was performed by or with the boy, but rather something done to him.

Although the poem is told from the point of view of Roethke as a child, it is, significantly, told in the past tense. If the poem were truly to view the scene through the boy’s eyes, it would be in the present tense and would read something like: “The whiskey on your breath makes me dizzy; but I hang on like death: such waltzing is not easy.” The events would unfold as the boy experiences them. But “My Papa’s Waltz” is a poem written by an adult looking back on events from long before. Through an imaginative use of memory the poet provides us with a dual perspective on the father. We see the awe-inspiring figure the child sees, but we also see the inebriated and rambunctious laborer that the adult observes.

We need not choose between the two views of the father, nor indeed should we attempt to. The poem is not simply about something that happened to a child, it is also about what happens when that event is remembered when the child is an adult. The past becomes part of the present in the process of recalling it. The present is the moment of the poem’s writing, but that moment is suffused with the past.

Order and Disorder

“My Papa’s Waltz” announces its central image in the title: the waltz, a formal dance. A waltz, like other dances, is a prescribed set of steps that organizes movements in time and in space, giving them order. In the poem it was the father who led the dance, who “beat time” on his son’s head. It was he who established the order of the household. The mother was a disapproving but, in the context of the poem, an inactive presence. The boy did all he could just to keep up: “Such waltzing,” he states, “was not easy.” But the poem also shows that the father was a force of disorder as well. He was drunk. He made his son dizzy, caused pans to fall from the shelf, and scraped the boy’s ear. The fact that he missed steps suggests that he could not adhere to the order that he himself had instituted.

There is a sense in the poem that the waltz was not an isolated incident, that it was often repeated. One almost has the feeling that it was a daily pattern, a bedtime ritual. This means, then, that the disorderly dance was, paradoxically, itself a form of order, a regularly recurring event that established a routine in the household. The waltz in the title thus refers not to a dance as it commonly understood, but rather it refers to a regularly performed set of disorderly movements. It was a unique sort of waltz, a unique sort of order that incorporated disorder. It was a waltz created and defined by “My Papa.”