The melancholic and resentful tone in My Papa’s Waltz is a striking message of the author to his own father. The poem is very moving and arouses a feeling of sympathy towards a little boy particularly because of the tone he uses. This is not a mere retelling of his childhood; rather it is a message to his dead – not a perfect parent.
So, the author uses a very sound metaphor saying that the waltz was like being beaten up. The scene unveils a drunk dad waltzing around the kitchen with a little son, knocking over the pans. The waltz itself was not a pleasure to a boy as his father’s whiskey breath ‘… could make a small boy dizzy’ (Roethke 198). Although many think that author uses waltz as a graceful and beautiful dance, it is used here to highlight the irony and outline the author’s painful look back at his childhood. Moreover, the second person is used ‘your breath’ (Roethke 198) which means Theodore Roethke is addressing his dad as if trying to reproach the parent with the attitude to a little son.
Furthermore, a father seems to be abusive to his child because a kid could not get away from the waltzing but was still having his ‘ear scraped a buckle’ (Roethke 198). The lines ‘But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy.’ (Roethke 198) describe a possibility that a boy could actually be beaten up by the father or he was beaten up but still seeking love from his dad. This makes the situation even more pathetic. The look of the mother ensures the father’s incorrect and abusive actions. It is rarely observed that a father can play so roughly with the son. The words that the author used are death, beat, and scraped – all of these are negative connotations.
Another poem called The Old Falling Down is also about a childhood of a lady – the author is Ursula K. Le Guin. The poem seems to have a sad ending saying: ‘when I get there to my high room, find no bed, no chair, bare floor’ (Le Guin 56). The author is trying to get back in time. Also, it can be interpreted as if she is dreaming. She sees an old falling down house that happens to be a symbol of her vanishing memories of childhood. She recalls the days when she used to be young and have her room furnished. Today, when she goes downstairs to an old, decrepit house, she closes her eyes and sees the way the house used to look. The hard attempts to get upstairs to her high room and ‘there are no stairs’ signal about the childhood to be impossible to reach (Le Guin 56). She will never ever return to that time and ‘I climb hand over clambering’ is showcasing how hard it is for her to accept the impossibility to return (Le Guin 56).
Such climbing may mean the distance in time between the current years and the years of childhood, or the obstacle her psyche was putting up because the author had problems or was abused when she was little. However, she makes it and climbs up to her high room where she sees nothing. The room is empty – no furniture and bare floor; this is a harsh sign of the gone-by years. Nothing is possible to return unless you have a time machine. And the empty room is most likely a sign of passed away relatives. The author reluctantly accepts the truth, though she has to.
Works Cited
Le Guin, Ursula, K. Wild Oats and Fireweed: New Poems. New York: Harpercollins, 1988. Print.
Roethke, Theodore. The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. New York: Anchor Press, 1974. Print.