EBSCO Publishing Citation Format MLA (Modern Language Asso.docx

EBSCO Publishing Citation Format: MLA (Modern Language
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Works Cited
Fong, Bobby. “Roethke’s `My Papa’s Waltz’.” College
Literature, vol. 17, no. 1, Feb. 1990, p. 78.
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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
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of the poem; the playfulness of a rime like dizzy and easy; the
joyful suggestions of the words
waltz, waltzing, and romped. Probably the reader didn't stop to
visualize this scene in all its
comedy, with kitchen pans falling and the father happily using
his son's head for a drum. Nor did
he stop to feel the suggestions in the last line, with the boy still
clinging with persistent love.[ 3]
Students espousing this reading have noted that their own
fathers were reserved when sober,
and that some of their fondest moments were when "papa"
became tipsy enough so that
exuberance and love could slip through. This "papa" wasn't the
man they knew, so there was
some anxiety felt regarding the "stranger," but he was what
these students as children wanted
more often from their fathers.

By contrast, the other side's response is captured by John
Ciardi, who argues:
Despite its seeming lightness, "My Papa's Waltz" is a poem of
terror, all the more terrible
because the boy is frightened and hurt by the father, even in
play. "We romped," the poet says,
but the romp is a dizzying succession of painful glimpses; the
house is shaking, the mother is
frowning, the father's hand is scarred by violence, every misstep
in the dance scrapes the
father's belt buckle painfully across the boy's ear, and the boy's
head is being pounded by that
huge, hard palm. It is a romp, but the boy must cling like death
until he is finally dumped into
bed.[ 4]
For these students, alcohol is invariably associated with
violence, and the mention of whiskey
on the breath calls to mind incidents when their fathers came
home drunk and "romped" with the
family. What was "fun" for the father, however, was fearful for
mother and children. These
readers see the waltz image and the rhythm of the poem as
ironic counterpoints to the
stumbling brutality of a man who hurts even when he doesn't

mean to. A more extreme reading
of the poem takes the waltz entirely as a euphemism for the
father beating the child. The child
struggles to hold the father, to make him stop, and they lurch
around the kitchen to the mother's
discountenance. This "waltzing was not easy," students have
testified from hard experience.
The poem is like a seesaw, where the elements of joy (the figure
of the waltz, the playful
rhymes, the rhythm), are balanced against the elements of fear
(predominantly the effects of
diction such as whiskey, dizzy, death, unfrown, battered,
knuckle, scraped, buckle, beat, hard,
dirt, clinging). The ambivalence of feeling extends to the
narrative stance of the speaker. As a
student recently noted, the speaker is remembering an incident
of childhood, and if the child
shared in the father's joy, the adult has learned to understand
the mother's disapproval, for the
adult stands with the mother, observing.
The "preferred reading" among these interpretations is not a
simple matter of appealing to the
text. The New Criticism, with its focus on ambiguity, figurative
language, and irony, has not

resulted in the narrowing of interpretive possibilities, but rather
has provided tools to account for
a poem's elements in a variety of ways and has proliferated
interpretations. In the present case,
those who maintain a balance between joy and fear in the poem
give equal weight to both
emotions. Those who see the joy in the poem 8 the diction of
violence. And those who see the
fear treat the figure and rhythm of the waltz ironically. A
seesaw tips easily, and "My Papa's
Waltz" is susceptible to the pressure of personal experience.
This is not to say that one's personal experience must always be
privileged in reading a poem.
Following the lead of H. R. Swardson in "The Use of the Word
Mistake in the Teaching of
Poetry," there are no hippopotamuses in "My Papa's Waltz." As
Swardson puts it, "the student
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who sees a hippopotamus there has made a mistake. I will say
that interpretive communities

who see a hippopotamus there have, en masse, made a
mistake."[ 5] What I have reported of
my students is recurring patterns of interpretation that, in my
estimation, account for the various
elements of the poem in coherent but different ways. The words
of a poem create a series of
filters that eliminate possible meanings. In the universe of
possible readings, comparatively few
precipitate through all the filters. But in a poem like "My Papa's
Waltz," several different
readings do succeed in making their way through. At that point,
the "preferred reading" is not
found in the text, but in the interaction of reader and text.
Students are not disembodied
intelligences; rather, they bring to the text distinctive pasts that
comprise additional filters
screening out possible readings. This essay is a field report on
that last set of filters.
At a recent conference, I learned that the poem is used in
Jungian psychotherapy to treat
alcoholics. W. D. Snodgrass writes that in The Lost Son and
Other Poems, of which "My Papa's
Waltz" was one, Roethke "regressed into areas of the psyche
where the powerful thoughts and

feelings of the child---the raw materials and driving power of
our later lives--remain under the
layers of rationale and of civilized purpose."[ 6] The
achievement of "My Papa's Waltz" is that it
permits readers to access such potent memories in their own
lives in ways consistent with the
words and construction of the poem.
NOTES
[1] Karl Malkoff, Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the
Poetry (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1966) 3, 57.
[2] See William V. Davis, "Fishing An Old Wound: Theodore
Roethke's Search for Sonship,"
Antigonish Review 20 (1974): 33; and Walter B. Kalaidjian,
Understanding Theodore Roethke
(Columbia University of South Carolina Press, 1987) 51.
[3] X. J. Kennedy, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction,
Poetry, and Drama, 4th ed. (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1987) 421.
[4] John Ciardi and Miller Williams, How Does a Poem Mean?
2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1975) 369.

[5] H. R. Swardson, "The Use of the Word Mistake in the
Teaching of Poetry." ADE Bulletin 91
(Winter 1988): 4-5.
[6] W. D. Snodgrass, "That Anguish of Concreteness--Theodore
Roethke's Career," Theodore
Roethke: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Arnold Stein (Seattle:
University of Washington Press,
1965) 81.
~~~~~~~~
by Bobby Fong
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c
b1up
b2up
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b4up

b5up
b6upWorks Cited
Sheet1Exercise Question #1Exercise Question #2Project
Criteria & WeightCriteria 1Criteria 2Criteria 3Weighted &
Total ScoreProject Criteria & WeightCriteria 1Criteria
2Criteria 3Weighted & Total Score10641073Project
A435Project A134Project B323Project B353Project C243Project
C543Project D134Project D231
Exercise Question #1
Highlight your table in Excel. Copy the table. In Word, place
cursor where you want to Paste the Table. Right click and under
Paste Options click Picture. This will paste the Table into your
Word document as a Picture.
Discussion: Your Discussion should be double spaced and fill
the rest of the page.

Exercise Question #2
Discussion:
1064
435
323
243
134
Project A
Project B
Project C
Project D
Weighted
& Total
Score
Project
Criteria &
Weight
Criteria 1Criteria 2Criteria 3

1073
134
353
543
231
Project D
Project
Criteria &
Weight
Project B
Criteria 2Criteria 3
Weighted
& Total
Score
Project A
Criteria 1
Project C

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