“My Papa’s Waltz” was written by Theodore Roethke, which is a stanza poem with 16 lines.
The narrator of the poem seems to be a young child speaking about an experience with his drunken father. In this poem the father came home after a night of drinking. As the father enters the house he grabs the child by the wrist with his battered knuckles, which indicates that he works with his hands. Playfully knocking down the pans, the mother irritated gives them an unhappy frown. The rhyme scheme is as follows, breath/death, dizzy/easy, pans/countenance, shelf/itself, wrist/missed, knuckle/buckle, head/bed and shirt/dirt. It’s obvious that the rhyme scheme is abab/cdcd. The rhyming in this poem seems to imitate