"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke

[@dmillener3619]

Regarding the mother, if you look at diction and what romped means..it's a playful or frolicking gesture so there are indications that the boy was not being abused, but dancing with a drunkenly aggressive dad. Also, the one knuckle and caked palm could indicate that the dad is a manual laborer. If you pat yourself on the head with a palm, it's not abusive, it's keeping rhythm.

[@tanookipower]

Beautiful analysis, thank you so much for the help!

[@shreyasrivastava5914]

Can you explain "Crossing the bar" by Alfred Lord Tennyson

[@mehditantan4207]

love it and hope seeing much video like this in the nearest future so am suggesting some poetry to be analysed as ( John Keats,"ode to autumn"- Sylvia Plath's" Mirror" - "the Road not taken" "SONNET and "To his coy Mistress" .

[@ayotruth6731]

This was very helpful thank you!

[@anitaowiti8051]

Thank you so much this was so helpful

[@chqeyoung7237]

thank you

[@JeffRebornNow]

I can not see (and Roethke never intended this poem to indicated) that his father was a violent figure. It's absurd. If anything it alludes to the ambivalence inherent in the son/father relationship. You know, authors do not react to their creations the same way readers do. Sylvia Plath used to laugh uproariously after she read publicly her poem "Daddy." And Tennessee Williams would sit in the theater and, at the end of "A Streetcar Named Desire," when the white-coats were taking Blanche away, he would laugh out loud and say, "Well, she's off to the loony bin now."

[@dbiniaz]

The mother's "countenance" gives clearly what the tone and situation are. No crazy abusiveness. Brilliant subtle work. Attend to the nuances and it's in the bag.

[@chrissyb7916]

Drunkenness leads to unpredictable behavior. Couple with "You beat time on my head" and scrapped ears does create an image of something unhealthy happening to the child.

[@gw6477]

@@chrissyb7916 The imagery evokes varying berths where people's childhoods and their relationship with their fathers existed. To make a determination that can only be 'abuse' or negatively hurting the child misses the intent Roethke had for the ambiguousness inherent throughout. This general analysis of this poem ends up boxing it into the negative interpretations and stymies what one gets from reading it through one's own perspective of experiences with their fathers. Thus the certainty in the connotation with which literary analysts subject this poem undermines the poem from reaching its full depth. Without it, the poem can't reach deeper into describing how a child, leaving a mother's care, learns from a hard man for a hard world and doesn't go back to ignorance.

[@TheMindspringsEnglishTeacher]

@@gw6477 The ambiguity is perhaps from the perspective of a very young child who is unable to process the possible violence or latent roughness that we, as observing adults, read with the greater maturity of experience and knowledge. For the child, the sensory details are innocent or factual as he knows no other to compare, where the parent figure supersedes the potential threatening signs that an outsider can easily discern. That in itself is the poet's genius. The waltz metaphor suits this brilliantly. There is a mix of words which in two adults dancing might be read as sado-masochistic. Here the pathos comes from the everyday innocence and trust.

[@charmainequamina7673]

@@chrissyb7916 It's a waltz..(123; 123; 123 rhythm)... not "pound" time on my head.

[@Van-fc8qt]

Not Rit-ka ... but Ret-Key

[@dbiniaz]

Or maybe they mistook as Ril'ke

[@JeffRebornNow]

I thought he pronounced it wrong.