First published in 1942, “My Papa’s Waltz,” by Theodore Roethke (pronounced RET-key), was critical in providing a template for introspective, confessional poetry, which would emerge as the dominating school in American post-war poetry before the rise of the Beat movement in the late 1950s.

In using his own life as subject fit for examination in poetic form, Roethke here draws on a single apparently happy memory from his own childhood—a night he and his very drunk father awkwardly, if playfully, danced in the family kitchen before bedtime. Roethke explores his complicated love/hate relationship with a working-class father who struggled to understand his son, a voracious reader gifted in the classroom and drawn to the intoxicating rhythms and rhymes of poetry, all foreign to the father’s more conventional world of experience. The poem, which uses the metaphor of the dance itself to explore the quiet pain and emotional confusion of misunderstood children and the unsettling relationship with their parents, is Roethke’s most recognized work. Given the poem’s ambiguous treatment of the father figure, it is also the subject of countless psychological analyses concerning the role of parents in children’s development. Indeed, the poem is one of the most frequently anthologized works in the canon of 20th-century American poetry.

Poet Biography

Known for his meticulous revision process, reworking each line to metric clarity, and for his mastery of a wide variety of poetic forms, Theodore Roethke was a poet’s poet. His work, although recognized with national awards—most notably the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and the Bollingen Lifetime Achievement Prize—never found a wide readership. He was a committed academic and used the forum of the classroom to influence a generation of young poets drawn to his conviction that poetry was designed to explore the contradictory and often dark emotions of the poet.

Roethke, born May 25, 1908 in the working-class city of Saginaw, Michigan, was the son of a German immigrant who operated a floral market and greenhouse. Although Roethke responded deeply to the earthiness and fecundity of the family’s business operations, he delighted more in the poetry he read in his English classes. When he was only 14, his father, a towering presence in his young life, a man who struggled with an alcohol use disorder, died of cancer. Roethke, for consolation, turned to poetry and began writing verses while still in high school. He attended the nearby University of Michigan and completed his bachelor’s degree (1929) and master’s degree (1936). Unable to continue his education because of the economic calamities of the Depression, Roethke turned to teaching. Over the next 10 years, Roethke completed teaching stints at several universities, ending in 1947 when he accepted a creative writing position at the University of Washington outside Seattle. During this peripatetic time, Roethke’s work began to appear, initially in prestigious literary journals but ultimately in collections of verse that were well-received. Inspired in part by the sensation over the publication in the 1920s of the poetry of Emily Dickinson decades after her death, Roethke explored candidly and quite publicly his own psychological wounds. His work, often painfully honest, found an appreciative audience among a generation of fledgling poets, most notably Sylvia Plath.

Roethke enjoyed his role in the classroom and responded to the tonic natural landscape of the Pacific Northwest, but he also had bipolar disorder and an alcohol use disorder. In August 1963, at the age of just 55, Roethke died after suffering a massive heart attack while swimming in a friend’s pool in Seattle. He was buried in Saginaw.

Poem Text

Roethke, Theodore. “My Papa’s Waltz.” 1942. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Inspired by a memory from the poet’s own childhood, the poem focuses on a brief encounter one night between a father and his young son. It begins happily, even lovingly, but closes in a disturbing feeling of uncertainty over the boy’s helplessness and his fear over his own father.

In the first stanza, the poet recalls one night as a “small boy” (Line 2) how his father came home, his breath reeking of whiskey enough to make the boy “dizzy” (Line 2). It is just before the boy’s bedtime, and he is happy to see his father before heading off to bed. Apparently feeling playful, the father tries to engage his reluctant son in an impromptu waltz in the kitchen, a reflection more of the father’s inebriation than affection for the son. The mother, sitting at the kitchen table, disapproves as the boy is set to settle down for the night. The boy, uncertain of the carefully programmed steps of the dance, clings to his father “like death” (Line 3) as the two spin about the kitchen awkwardly and carelessly. “[W]altzing,” the poet confesses looking back, “was not easy” (Line 4).

In stanza two, the poet concedes that the dance was itself more of a happy and frantic romp (Line 5). The two would-be dancers cause sufficient shakes that pans come clanging off the kitchen shelves, suggesting the father’s extreme state of inebriation as well as his physical strength and bulk. The poet recalls his mother, sitting at the kitchen table, frowning over the two as they move clumsily about the tight kitchen space but doing nothing to stop them.

In stanza three, the poet particularizes the long-ago memory by focusing on the size and strength of his father. He recalls his father’s large and calloused hands, one knuckle “battered” (Line 10) presumably from a long day’s work or an indication that the father had been involved in a fight. Years later, the poet recalls the feeling of that hand holding his tiny wrist, gripping it as the two mimicked ballroom dancers, the father leading. As the dance grows more frenetic and careless, the boy feels increasingly alarmed over his helplessness as he is led about the kitchen. The poet then underscores the height (and by extension the age) difference—the boy barely comes up to his father’s waist—and how that difference made the dancing that much more awkward. The poet recalls how whenever the father would miss a step, easy to do as they danced without music and without much syncopation, his right ear would scrape painfully against the father’s protruding belt buckle.

In the closing stanza, the poet recalls how the drunk father would keep the beat of the waltz by tapping the count on the boy’s head with his open palm “caked hard by dirt” (Line 14). The father is oblivious, of course, to the impact of his large hand thumping on the boy’s head. The boy still struggles to keep up with the dance, hanging on to his father now desperately, the fun collapsing into a tense feeling of helplessness. The father finally dances the boy off to his room, all the while the boy still clinging to his father’s shirt before, at last, accepting the quiet refuge of his bed and sleep.