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Parent child relationships in literature poetry
Parent child relationships in literature poetry
Parent child relationships in literature poetry
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Roethke's “My Papa's Waltz” explores a complicated relationship between and alcoholic father and his son. The complex text uses stanzas and iambic trimeter to express tense situations between father and son. Roethke utilizes a direct address to, through the use of violent diction and painful imagery, illustrate the inner turmoil of the son as he “hangs on like death” to the dying connection he shares with his father. The narrator is a child terrorized by his abusive father and the insidious tone of the piece looks to demonstrate that “My Papa’s Waltz” is more disturbing than a playful romp around the bedroom. The poem is broken up into four stanzas and follows an iambic trimeter or an abab rhyme scheme. Roethke utilizes both the structure …show more content…
Though the author does not directly state that that father is abusive towards his son, Rothke alludes to violence through imagery. Abusive children are often seen with bruises on their wrist as their parents clench their arm in an effort to “control” their children. Roethke uses this fact to demonstrate to his readers that the son in his work is abused. Furthermore the author also uses words that carry a negative connotation such as battered and scraped, to allude to the sinister meaning behind the poem. The author's diction encapsulated the negative meaning to the poem and allowed the readers to realize abuse was occurring. To continue, Roethke uses the image of a waltz to add an ironic twist to the poem. “My Papa’s Waltz” has a positive connotation as waltzes are viewed by society as graceful dances. However, Roethke uses the image of a waltz to describe a father brutalizing his son. This contrast between the waltz and the content of the poem is ironic due to the graceful nature of the dance but the violent and messy nature of the poems content. Children with abusive parents tend to hid the abuse and the waltz in the story served as the image the family displayed to society, a perfect family, whereas the content of the poem represents the true nature of the
The most notable qualities of Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” are the tone and language of the poem which convey the nostalgia adult author feels thinking about the time spent with his father. In the title narrator’s father is affectionately referred to as “Papa” making the impression that the main character and his father are close. The use of possessive pronoun “my” contributes to the overall impression that the father holds special place in the narrator’s heart. As word “waltz” in the title implies the poem gives account of the festive occasion in which the narrator’s father takes part.
Roethke’s and Hayden’s poems use tone in the same way to show that both children ultimately love their fathers regardless of the abuse he commits. The young boy in My Papa’s Waltz is clearly very fond of his father even though his Papa abuses him. It is through the tone the young boy uses that Roethke shows how much he loves his father. This is first enforced when the boy says, “But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy” (Roethke, 3-4). The boy loves his father and he h...
Roethke’s poem has a regular rhyme scheme that can be expressed as “abab”. The only exception to this scheme would be the first stanza as the words “dizzy” (2) and “easy” (4) are slant rhymes. Only the end syllables of the two words sound the same. As a result, the use of a consistent “abab” rhyme scheme allows the poem to reflect the
In “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, was a great poem that can mean many different things to many different people of this world. To me I think it was just a boy who just wanted to spend time with his dad before he has to go to bed. The boy probably does not get to spend time with his dad that much. The father probably works all day and all week and this is the only time the boy gets to spend with him. Roethke use of words in this poem is amazing. The use of the words in this story can mean different things to the reader. The first word to look at is the word waltz. In the dictionary the word waltz is a dance for a fast triple meter song. This is just what the father is doing with his son but his is drunk and dizzy. “But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy (Roethke)” The word death is not what people usually think but nobody can shake or get away from death. So the boy was holding on to his father where his father could not get away from him like the boy did not want him to go. “We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf (Roethke)” another word to understand is romped. The word romped means to play or frolic in a lively or boisterous manner. To go deeper in the definition boisterous means rough and noisy. While the father and the son are playing around dancing they are also messing up the house as well. Messing up the kitchen will make any mother mad and that is what happens next. Of out any other place in the house the kitchen is the woman’s throne room. “The hand that held my wrist was battered on one knuckle; at every step you missed my right ear scraped a buckle (Roethke).” In lines 9-12 you can tell that the father has came back from a long day of work. The father’s job has to be doing something wi...
For example, the first two lines of the poem read: "The whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy;" (Roethke 668). This excerpt appears to set a dark sort of mood for the entire rest of the poem. By the first two lines, the reader may already see how this man feels about his father's drunkenness. It seems as if Roethke has preceded his poem with this factor in order to demonstrate the resentment that he feels toward his father.
My Papa's Waltz, by Theodore Roethke, is a poem about an abusive father from the perspective of his child. The poem has a bit of violence and mature themes that give it a dark tone. However, this dark tone is hidden by a lighter tone given by simple rhymes and diction. The theme of the waltz also gives this poem its lighter tone, as the dance is elegant, simple, and innocent. Overall, this poem uses its structure to create a poem which seems simple upon a first listening, but demonstrates deeper meanings and themes when further analyzed.
In the poem My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke, there seems to be two conflicting tones at play. There is a tone of love and admiration that is seen through the eyes of an innocent child, but there is also the tone of an experienced man who is looking back on his childhood and is finally acknowledging the harshness with which he was treated and the helplessness he felt.
Child abuse is physical mistreatment that unfortunately happens to children everywhere around the world. In the same way, the poem “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, describes and gives the readers an insight of what child abuse is like. The poem presents a relationship between a drunken father and his son. Therefore, the setting, sensory details, and word choice of the poem allows the reader to understand the violence the little boy goes through after his father returns from work.
Theodore Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz” is a recollection of a little boy’s relationship with his father which depicts child abuse that is summarized into one incident. Theodore Roethke was outstanding in the way he portrayed the abuse by using the melody of the waltz that expresses how the speaker feels by the actions of his father. The waltz is being used as a long metaphor for the father and small boy’s relationship, and the use of metaphors give details of the disturbing link between the father, the mother, and the small boy. The waltz is supposed to be an elegant and friendly dance, but the dance in this poem indicates a gloomier side to it that shows the reader strong disturbing feeling beneath the poem’s exterior.
Theodore Roethke’s poem, “My Papa's Waltz”, uses cryptic language to convince the reader that the child does not encounter abuse from his father, just a drunken dance.
Through structure and pathetical of the poem, Roethke warns the reader of the potent effects of alcoholism. Roethke warns the reader about the potent effects of alcoholism
In the third stanza of “My Papa’s Waltz,” the readers will notice the lines read: “The hand that held my wrist/was battered on one knuckle.” Roethke’s audience is under the impression that they are a lower class family and the father works somewhere the requires manual labor. Some might believe that be boy respects his father and the hard work he does. Others will focus more on the “battered knuckle” and the father’s hand placement. This injury to his hand could have happened in a work accident, but it also could have happened in a prior altercation with his child or wife, not to mention the word battered is commonly used as a substitution for the word abuse. When waltzing, a man typically hands his partner's hand, not their wrist. Typically when a child is grabbed by the wrist it is a form of punishment. Roethke shows his audience that there is a fine line between respect and
After reading the lines “whiskey on [his] breath” and “could make a small boy dizzy” we get a vision that a father is coming home so intoxicated that the “small boy” can barely talk to his father without getting dizzy from the smell. Some more words that give us a series of images are “my mother’s countenance” and “could not unfrown itself.” In line seven, “countenance” means appearance or facial expression. Knowing that definition helps us, the readers, see that the mother is truly sad and she cannot “unfrown” her face. In lines nine and ten, Roethke writes “the hand that held my wrist” and “was battered on one knuckle.” Most people infer that Roethke is suggesting abuse because of the use of the word “battered.” “Battered” means to damage by beating which leads the readers to think that “My Papa’s Waltz” is about intentional abuse. After reading the context of the poem, we can infer that the father used his hands are “battered” because of his job. The use of the imagery described above helps us, the readers, understand the poem, “My Papa’s Waltz”
Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" is about a relationship between a father and his son. Beginning with the title, the author's meticulous choice of voca...
Theodore Roethke writes in “My Papa’s Waltz” about what many would read as a morbid recollection of childhood trauma, resting under a veil of innocent language and tone. The work is what it is - poetry. So, while the theme or the tone may seem childlike and light hearted at times, it interprets as dark once one dissects the work.