What Is My Papa's Waltz Poem

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Love is something that can take many forms, on hand there is the oohey-gooey type of unrealistic type love that is fed to us through hollywood. That type of love will never work. However there is a type of love rooted in respect and acceptance of the others faults. It does not need to be some grand gesture is hollywood would like us to believe, it will never be “free and easy”(good and gone by frank turner). The love in My Papa’s Waltz is a love of son who despite his father’s tragic faults and abusive tendencies he still finds it in himself to have a certain level of love and respect for his father. In the poem Those Winter Sundays, love is shown through a father’s tireless sacrifice for his family and putting his own comfort aside, sleeping in after a long work week, so that his family may wake up on a Sunday morning to a warm house and shined shoes for church. …show more content…

As shown by the poet it is often hard for a young child to understand exactly what is going on and what abuse it because to the child that is the normal in this case the child in the poem describes the abuse as being a playful game or a dance between father and son. He is caught between love and fear for his father. “But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy.”(lines 2-3). This shows that even though he is afraid and beaten by his father he still has respect and admiration for him based on the fact that he could not easily keep up he still manages to hold onto his father. The word death is line three is important it shows, often in love poems it’s a promise to love until the end, to never leave and to love until the end. In this poem it’s a youngs boys desperation for his father’s love, for his father to return the love that the his son shows

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