In “My Papa’s Waltz,” Theodore Roethke imaginatively re-creates a childhood encounter with his father but also begins to attempt to understand the meaning of the relationship between them. The poem may be read as a warm memory of happy play, but when one is familiar with the rest of Roethke’s work, a darker view of the event emerges. Although the poem is only sixteen short lines, it is one of Roethke’s most moving and most frequently anthologized poems.

Theodore Roethke was born and grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, where his father and uncle operated a large and successful greenhouse. Sometimes Roethke’s father would stay up late into the night watering and otherwise tending to his plants. After a drink to relax, he would swing his son Theodore around the kitchen in a bearlike dance and then carry him off to bed. Roethke stated in an interview that his father would hook his son’s feet through the father’s rubber bootstraps and, with Theodore’s feet thus trapped, haul the youngster about.

Roethke’s poetic description of this scene conveys both the father’s love for the son and the son’s fear of this overpowering event, a combination which explains why the poem has haunted so many readers. At first the child finds merely the smell of the alcohol on his father’s breath overwhelming, but he endures the experience and hangs on to his father’s shirt: “Such waltzing was not easy.” The “waltz” is so violent that pots and pans begin to fall to the floor, and the audience of this intended hilarity is not amused: “My mother’s countenance/ Could not unfrown itself.”

This activity comes as a release after the father’s hard work in the greenhouse: “The hand that held my wrist/ Was battered on one knuckle;” and “You beat time on my head/ With a palm caked hard by dirt.” What is fun for the adult is an ordeal for the child. When his father misses a step in his wild dance, the child’s ear scrapes against his father’s belt buckle. This detail also indicates that the child is quite small, since, while standing on his father’s boots, his head reaches barely past his father’s waist; this account must be a recollection of very early childhood.

The entire experience acts as a sort of dramatic lullaby, as it is the last event of the day before bedtime. The child, however, is hardly relaxed and ready for sleep, since to survive the “waltz,” he has had to “cling” to his father’s shirt; he continues to do so as he is carried away to bed.

Roethke uses a number of poetic devices that reinforce the meaning of the poem; the meter, although it is iambic, sometimes adds an extra feminine syllable at the end of the second or fourth lines, such as “Could make a small boy dizzy” and “Such waltzing was not easy.” The additional foot produces a stumbling effect that adds to the poem’s description of a clumsy waltz.

The poem’s short lines also reinforce the fact that this experience is happening to a child. In his later poetry, Roethke uses nursery rhymes, jingles, and playground taunts to suggest the world of children to which he was trying to return in imagination and spirit. In “My Papa’s Waltz,” however, there is nothing to imagine, since the incident really happened—apparently more than once. Roethke wants the reader to identify with the child, not the adults in the poem, so he not only writes the poem...