I’m great fan of Theodore Roethke’s poems, particularly his villanelle, “The Waking” (beautifully performed by jazz singer Kurt Elling. (click here to listen to The Waking on You Tube.) Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” is included in the textbook I use for my Introduction to Poetry course as a good example of stanzaic form. It’s one of the few poems using trimeter that I feel works very well. (And that’s a challenge. I’d love to hear suggestions that would cause me to change my mind.)
A few weeks ago, on one of the rare warm days we’ve had this spring, I read “My Papa’s Waltz” to my class, hoping to pull the gazes of the young men who sit by the window back into the classroom. I’d hoped this poem’s subject, about a boy and his father, would evoke some talk of the poem’s swaying, and even encourage a student to admit to dancing with his own father.
My Papa's Waltz
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.
But the response, even before I finished reading the poem, surprised me. Many of the students shifted in their seats, murmuring to each other. There were a few disgusted tsks.
I went home that night and contacted a few of the poets, far more experienced than I as teachers, whose opinions function as reality checks for me. I wanted to know if longtime teachers of poetry had seen a shift in the way this poem (and perhaps others) is interpreted by students over the years.
Here’s a bit of Gray Jacobik’s reply:
I taught “Introduction to Poetry” from 1989 until 2004, and noticed a change in the mid to late 90s in that the idea of child abuse (beatings) and even incest would become part of the interpretation (not always, but not infrequently either).
I remember one occasion in particular when a debate ensued in class. The father was regarded as an abusive alcoholic, the child life’s endangered (“I hung on like death”), and the “waltz” regarded as symbolic, not literal, standing for the kind of dodging and manipulation that becomes the way a child needs to behave around an alcoholic father who may turn violent suddenly and erratically.
Tomorrow I’ll post the second half of this blog entry, which will include a response by Dick Allen, as well as some thoughts on how these shifts happen and how (or whether) they can serve as grist for classroom discussion.
I welcome suggestions and thoughts!
Depending on the sophistication of the class, you might frame this as a discussion of what the reader brings to the poem - how our own cultural, biographical, and psychological prisms influence what light(s) a particular poem casts onto the wall for us.
Posted by: Laura Orem | April 28, 2011 at 04:50 PM
This poem made me uncomfortable from the very first time I heard it, in grade school, I think (and we're going way back now). At the time, I didn't have the awareness or vocabulary to know, much less explain, why the poem so unsettled me. As an adult, the poem immediately came to mind when I first read the James Joyce short story "Counterparts" in The Dubliners, a much more explicit story of an alcoholic parent. My Papa's Walz was always taught as a poem of exuberance and play, with the mother more exasperated in the "Father Knows Best" way but that never seemed quite right to me. I find it menacing. I'm curious to know read others' comments. Thank you for this post.
Stacey
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | April 28, 2011 at 04:59 PM
My students generally agree that the father is emotionally abusive. They also tend to agree that the waltz is a metaphor for the father-son relationship; it should be easier, like a waltz, but it's not. The father is clearly out of control("beat time," the pans falling, etc.)but not abusive.
Posted by: Caroline | April 28, 2011 at 07:45 PM
It's funny-- I was taught this poem as a blue collar father-son "waltz" circa the early 20th century, possibly Depression-era (or should I say "first Depression-era"?)I never read a note of alcoholism of abusiveness into the poem until my classroom experience. Now that I've heard the students' comments, I read it all over the poem, that sense of menace, as Stacey put it so well. Laura, I love your idea of using it as a means to explore "psychological prisms" and Caroline, you've some sophisticated students!
Part II's going up in a minute.
Posted by: Leslie McGrath | April 29, 2011 at 08:16 AM
I remember my best friend and I both discussing the subterranean current of the father's abusiveness circa 1992, reading the poem for Joseph Brodsky's class. It didn't seem coy or particularly hidden to us, just part of the poem's subtext.
Posted by: lycanthrope | April 29, 2011 at 12:06 PM
Brilliant ideas. I love this poem.
Posted by: Regina | May 31, 2017 at 04:06 AM