My Papa's WaltzThe whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pansSlid from the kitchen shelf;My mother's countenanceCould not unfrown itself.The hand that held my wristWas battered on one knuckle;At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.You beat time on my headWith a palm caked hard by dirt,Then waltzed me off to bedStill clinging to your shirt.
So what's your impression? Are you convinced that this is an allegory of child abuse? Maybe you are. If so, you have at least one thing in common with most people in my English class ("Foundations I") freshman year of high school.
Here's my question for you: why, exactly, is Roethke's poem so often interpreted this way? Obviously, any talk of a frustrated mother, a drunk father, ears scraping buckles, heads being beaten, hard palms is going to trigger certain reflexes, and plenty of overzealous high schoolers will rush to tsk-tsk at the father, whose "waltz" isn't what we'd like it to be.
But is the surface interpretation, that father and son are engaging in a traditional, dancelike romp around the house, a little too rowdy for the mother, that life is hard for this working-class family and thus alcohol commonplace, at all invalid? I don't think so. But I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.
We read this in Intro to Poetry in college. I really liked this poem and i remember the class discussion about this exact same thing.
ReplyDeleteI 100% agree with you. I think it was written this way purposefully, obviously, to show that fun can be had in a rough-housing kind of way. And that people's first impression for these sorts of things is always negative, but if you just think for 5 seconds it's really clear that this is just a representation of a family where the father works hard, gets dirty, drinks, and still loves his son and wants to have fun.
Yeah, we read this poem in my American Lit class last year and I thought it was adorable. My teacher had the same opinion, if I remember correctly. Of course the mother's annoyed; her pans have been knocked down. I think it's sweet that it shows a father whose drinking doesn't cause him to neglect his child.
ReplyDeleteLook, we've got all this great interpretive machinery: allegories, subtexts, hidden meanings. We've got to apply it to everything we see!
ReplyDeleteWhen all you've got is a hammer...
...everything looks like the broken automated column machine whose malfunctions literally haunt your dreams? I get it!
ReplyDeleteYour above commenter says "it's really clear that" it's not about child abuse.
ReplyDeleteTo me it's really clear that it's ambiguous and you can get out of it whatsoever you want. Isn't that the nice thing about art in the first place? That it is at once viscerally evocative and interpretationally flexible?
If you want to communicate something specific, you might do it using technical and precise language. If you want to move your audience, though, you leave them some work to do, some wiggle room in which to play around with meaning.
So sure, you could interpret it either way, I think. To me, the nice thing is that both interpretations are available.
I always think of Roethke's poem together with this one by Robert Hayden:
ReplyDeleteThose Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
I've always liked that poem; I think we read it sophomore year of high school. I had good teachers, or at least teachers with great taste in poetry.
ReplyDeleteActually, it was only a month ago or so that I brought it up in conversation and I misattributed it to "either Auden or Roethke." I think I was confusing it with the Auden essay about how much he prefers winter to summer, because summer makes him all languorous.