Blog Post #10 "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke

Poem:

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.

Response: 

To be completely honest, the first time I read this, I thought it was about the young boy being abused by his alcoholic father. the language that the poet uses to describe the scene is very violent and/or has a negative connotation. For example, the first line is "whiskey on your breath" which already sets the father up as someone who is drunk or has been drinking, and is followed by "could make a small boy dizzy," also showing that the father has been drinking enough to affect his son, either because he smells the whiskey, or the whiskey causes the father to act in such a way/do things that make the boy dizzy. Right after is also the line :hung on like death," the "death" part in particular adding to a dreary mood.
Then, there are the lines "The hand that held my wrist/ was battered on one knuckle." The fact that the father's knuckle is battered could suggest that he's violent/ gets into fights in order to have his knuckle damaged.
The two lines after, "my right ear scraped a buckle," could be seen as the son getting hit by a belt, like getting hit on his ears (I know some friends who used to be "disciplined" by being beat on the ears/head).  The next stanza starts with the line "you beat time on my head," with the word "beat" adding to this interpretation because it comes off as a very emphatic/strong way to put this, and could also be like the father beating him continuously over time.

However, I do think the poem can be read as just a very loud, rambunctious waltz session between a son and his father, where they're being super loud in the kitchen and mom disproves and whenever the missteps the son bumps his ear on his belt buckle because he's short and the dead is a little drunk so he's a bit careless with how he's keeping time on the kids head. It's just that the connotation of the words, and the diction, makes the scene seem very upsetting/violent/not like a super fond memory.

Update: I looked on shmoop and they talked about the poets history and how his dad died when he was young and that he still tends to write like a lost young boy and how even his memories that should be happy have been tainted with his father's death which could be why this scene came off as so morbid and I think that's really interesting!! Just because using the author's personal history to analyze a piece of literature sin't really something I'm super used to. I mean we've done it sometimes but it's never been super heavily emphasized/ ingrained in me to do it.