EBSCO Publishing Citation Format: MLA (Modern Language Assoc.): NOTE: Review the instructions at http://support.ebsco.com/help/?int=ehost&lang=en&feature_id=MLA and make any necessary corrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names, capitalization, and dates. Always consult your library resources for the exact formatting and punctuation guidelines. Works Cited Fong, Bobby. “Roethke’s `My Papa’s Waltz’.” College Literature, vol. 17, no. 1, Feb. 1990, p. 78. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=9609111563&site=lrc- plus. <!--Additional Information: Persistent link to this record (Permalink): http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=9609111563&site=lrc-plus End of citation--> Section: NOTES & DISCUSSION ROETHKE'S "MY PAPA'S WALTZ" Most recent critics of Theodore Roethke's work give "My Papa's Waltz" short shrift. If mentioned at all, it is characterized as depicting the father's "mixture of tenderness and brutality" and the child's "admiration and fear."[ 1] The waltz is at once a "happy and terrifying activity" that, biographically, reflects "Roethke's vacillation toward his father, registering playful but poignant tones in stanzas of iambic trimeter."[ 2] Some of my students are able to perceive the poem as thus holding fear and joy in tension, but mainly these are the ones who see the poem dispassionately, as a play of words on the page where waltzing and romped are juxtaposed with battered and scraped and beat, where the child is "waltzed off to bed" holding on "like death." The others, however, divide into two camps, united by their common insistence that one emotion predominates, either fear or joy. One party's interpretation accords with that of X. J. Kennedy, who argues: Most readers find the speaker's attitude toward his father affectionate, and take this recollection of childhood to be a happy one. But at least one reader, concentrating on certain details, once wrote: "Roethke expresses his resentment for his father, a drunken brute with dirty hands and a whiskey breath who carelessly hurt the child's ear and manhandled him." Although this reader accurately noticed some of the events in the poem and perceived that in the son's hanging on to the father "like death" there is something desperate, he missed the tone of the poem and so misunderstood it altogether. Among other things, this reader didn't notice the rollicking rhythms http://support.ebsco.com/help/?int=ehost&lang=en&feature_id=MLA http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=9609111563&site=lrc-plus http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=9609111563&site=lrc-plus http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=9609111563&site=lrc-plus http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=9609111563&site=lrc-plus https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_6866258545076574701_bib1 https:.