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An interpretation of "My Papa's Waltz" should take into account the complexity of the speaker's feelings that are brought about by the father's waltz. A dance should bring two people closer together. The dance in this poem acts that way, yet the darker side of this waltz, which is a powerfully unsettling emotion under the surface of the poem, dominates the mood, and the love and intimacy of the dance but does not make a strong impression on the reader. Theodore Roethke manipulates the reader's emotional response to the poem through a number of literary conventions, some of which play on the conventions of a waltz.
Waltzes are not difficult dances. They are set to light-hearted music. Couples sway back and forth, as they go round and round in a dance. The reader's emotions and sympathies do the same in the poem. The speaker carefully orders his images to juxtapose startling images with comforting images. In the first stanza, for instance, the speaker begins with an alarming image "the whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy." The second stanza begins with the words "we romped," undercutting the serious tone of the first stanza, yet the romping has consequences that reminds the reader again of the seriousness " pans slid from the kitchen shelf; my mother's countenance could not unfrown itself." The pattern is repeated throughout the poem, and the waltz spins out of control until the reader can only focus on a whirling sequence of disturbing emotions rather than a coherent overall feeling.
The poem is relatively brief with concise lines, and its language is for the most part reflective of a child's vocabulary and thus a child's perspective. Most of the words are either monosyllabic or disyllabic, with one notable exception in line seven "my mother's countenance could not unfrown itself." These are unusual and arresting lines in terms of diction, and they signal a change in the poem. These lines give special emphasis to the speaker's consciousness of his mother, she is not mentioned anywhere else in the poem, but her disapproval intensifies the situation.
The poem's pattern is not exact. Nor is the rhyme scheme exact. Slant rhymes like "dizzy/easy" and "pans/countenance" demonstrate that something is out of place. Like a waltz, the words move the reader great strides in one direction before swaying back the other way, leaving the reader emotionally exhausted by the end of the poem. Words like "romped" that seem pleasant or innocent dominate the first part of the poem, while aggressive words dominate the end "my right ear scraped a buckle…beat time on my head with a palm caked hard by dirt." At the same time, the word "death" appears in the first stanza and the comfort of going to bed in the final stanza. The overall effect is to sway the reader's emotion violently, as in a drunken waltz.
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There is only one example of simile in the poem, so the reader should pay special attention to its significance. In line three, the speaker hangs on "like death." It is a complex and abstract simile whose meaning is neither obvious nor stable. The fact that Roethke chooses "death" makes the reader consider his purpose. Perhaps Roethke introduces death to emphasize the danger of a situation or the darker side of the "waltz." Death hangs on in the sense that it is permanent, and perhaps the child wants to freeze this moment for the fear of what will happen if he or she lets go "But I hung on like death such waltzing was not easy." Death is something that hangs on and the speaker sees his or her younger self in terms of death.
The overall image that the reader has of the waltz depends partially on the reader's perspective. It is possible to view the poem from the father's point of view, from the mother's, and from the speaker's, but the most telling imagery in the poem surrounds the father's hands "the hand that held my wrist was battered on one knuckle." The speaker brings back a childhood impression of the father's hand. A hand holding a wrist is certainly more aggressive and domineering than a hand holding a hand. The hand holding the wrist implies both a difference in size of their hands and, perhaps, that the child "waltzes" unwillingly. The fact that the hand is "battered on one knuckle" connotes violence. The father, because of his knuckle, seems belligerent and potentially violent. The father's domineering nature in the poem reflects the title of the poem. The fact that the title is written in the singular possessive case "My Papa's Waltz" as opposed to "Our Waltz" emphasizes the control implicit in the poem.
The poem "My Papa's Waltz" directs the reader subtly to a distinct conclusion. While the poem is not about a child's hatred for his or her father, it does, however, connote physical control to the point of manipulation, and even abuse on the father's part. The waltz is dangerous, ultimately its imagery contains a disapproving mother, a battered knuckle, a buckle that repeatedly scrapes a young child's tender ear, and finally a dirt covered hand that strikes the child's head repeatedly under the guise of keeping time for the waltz. The fact that the speaker says, "you beat time on my head" instead of "kept time" reinforces this interpretation. The waltzing ritual is not about dancing; it is about a man who asserts and maintains physical control over his child even as he loses control of himself.
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