A Close Reading Analysis of “My Papa’s Waltz” Literature Essay

A Close Reading Analysis of “My Papa’s Waltz”
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Close Reading Analysis of “My Papa’s Waltz”
“My Papa’s Waltz” is one of the outstanding short poems by Theodore Roethke. The poet composed the works of literature during the 1940s to describe the life of a drunk father with his little son around the kitchen. The poem consists of four stanzas with four stanzas having four lines each, thus making it easy-flowing. Power, authority, family relations, and violence are the major themes in literary works. A boy in the poem has conflicting feelings towards that of his father. However, the father finds it difficult to love his father since he fears him. The poet narrates the story from the viewpoint of the protagonist while recollecting memorable moments from his childhood. However, the entire poem is ambiguous, and the choice of words is confusing as well.
Arguably, the various events in the poem suggest a violent struggle between a father and a son. A youthful tone of the poem’s title is a clear illustration that the speaker is a “small boy,” who addresses his father as “you” in the second person (lines 1-2). Despite the dizzying alcoholic scent of the father’s breathe and ways that he throws his child around, the love between them is evident in the poem. The narrator reveals the illumination of the boy’s blind love through the smile of the child hanging “like death” to his father, withstanding the complicated nature of waltz, which was quite hard (Roethke, 2015). The desire of the boy and the need to hold to the father is parallel to the excitement of waltz drinking whiskey. The poet introduces the father’s relationsh...