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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.
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about the poet
Theodore Roethke
(1908-1963). Born in Saginaw, Michigan, Roethke was the son of a greenhouse owner; greenhouses figure prominently in the imagery of his poems....(more)
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Exploring the patterns created
by the formal elements of a poem—alliteration, image,
tone, and metaphor, for example—helps us to understand
more deeply the poem’s meaning and the nuances that
enrich that meaning. This kind of formal close reading
of the poem’s text is fundamental to any analysis of
poetry.
To examine what roles various
literary elements play in "My Papa’s Waltz," click
on one of the following choices. Interactive questions
follow each analysis.
>Alliteration
>Diction
>Image
>Irony
>Meter
>Rhyme
>Simile
>Symbol
>Word Order
For a demonstration of how you
might pull together analyses of the elements of poetry
in "My Papa’s Waltz," see our sample
essay (PDF).
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"My Papa's Waltz" from COLLECTED POEMS OF THEODORE ROETHKE by Theodore Roethke, copyright. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc. Contributing author: Quentin Miller, Suffolk University
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