My Papa's Waltz

The author of My Papa’s Waltz, Theodore Roethke, portrays the speaker of the poem’s childhood in a surprisingly dark, negative tone. At first glance, it appears to be an innocent story of a child who dances around one night with his silly, happily drunken father. However, a close reading and analysis of the poem will show that this is not the case. For example, the line “You beat time on my head” refers to the child being hit and smacked. This line has a very negative connotation when it is fully analyzed. What is really going on is that he his being abused by his angry drunken father. This is memorable because it is presented in a way in which it seems that the speaker feels he does not have permission to, or that he is unable to communicate
He states in the first stanza that he wanders “lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o’er vales and hills,” which, in just reading the first line, may seem a bit melancholy. However, interpreting the vision of a magnificent cloud alone in the sky puts a positive spin on the idea. Additionally, the second line serves as a reminder of that positivity. He then refers to a vast expanse of flowers as “a crowd,/a host, of golden daffodils,” suggesting that the amount of flowers is overwhelming, but in no way is it a sign that one should not venture further. On the contrary, it seems a lot more like an invitation to join in on the ‘party’ that the flowers are having. If Wordsworth had simply called it “a bunch/a group of flowers,” it would not have had nearly the same effect, because ‘group’ and ‘crowd’ have very different implications as far as size goes. He furthers the hyperbole in the second stanza by calling the flowers “Continuous as the stars that shine/And twinkle on the milky way.” For most, the number of stars in our galaxy is entirely unfathomable. Furthermore, the idea of that many things existing in just one area on our planet is almost overwhelming, and it puts a great sprightly feeling into the reader’s