Theodore Roethke wrote the poem “My Papa’s Waltz” which reflects on his childhood memories of his father carrying him to bed. He reminisces about a past memory of him clinging to his father while walking through the house in a drunken state. He remembers how the voluminous smell of whiskey on his father’s breath could make him dizzy. How his father would accidently knock the pans until they fell off the kitchen shelf still lingers in his memory. He recalls his ear being scraped against his father’s
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Creative Analysis: “My Papa’s Waltz: The Sequel” As reader-response critics have long noted‚ opening up discussions of a poem to accommodate multiple interpretations can reveal striking things about how individual readers’ assumptions and cultural positions affect their understanding of what they read. “My Papa’s Waltz: The Sequel‚” a poem that expands Theodore Roethke’s poem‚ My Papa’s Waltz‚ better supports the original poem’s theme of mourning a beloved father as opposed to what some believe
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create his own style to show the world that habits‚ such as war can be broken even if it is in the past. He also used this poem to show order and disorder in the world. He used the waltz to do this‚ the father and son waltz‚ but the son struggle which brings to life the daily struggles for the son to keep up. The waltz was an organized dance in an unorganized life of a young boy. Roethke’s purpose in writing the poem “The Lost Son” was more to delve into his subconscious of when he was a child.
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My Papa’s Waltz Interpretation In My Papa’s Waltz the kid goes describes what it is like doing the waltz with his father. Their recollection seems to be something in between a positive and negative memory by having a change of mind in the middle of the poem. They discusses how their mother feels about the damage that they are causing‚ how the smell on their father’s breath smelt like whiskey‚ described what their father was like. Even though the kid was having fun the mother was not happy because
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The poem My Papa’s Waltz describes a child’s nostalgia towards his conflicted relationship with his father. In this poem the tone of the speaker is characterized by the deep devotion and love he felt towards his father during his youth. Looking back on the time his father spent playing with him when he was a child‚ the speaker describes “[hanging] on like death” and “clinging to [his] shirt” (Roethke 3‚16). These childlike descriptions show that the speaker felt a deep devotion to his father and
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"My Papa’s Waltz" Analysis In the poem "My Papa’s Waltz" by Theodore Roethke‚ the speaker is reflecting on a childhood experience involving his father. Some people think that this poem is one of a happy relationship between a father and son. Other people believe that this poem has a hidden message of parental abuse. In my point of view‚ the imagery and language‚ the symbolism‚ and tone in the poem gave me the impression of the love between the father and son‚ not of an abusive relationship. You
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Any interpretation of “My Papa’s Waltz” has to take into account the complexity of the speaker’s feelings that are brought about by his father’s waltz. A dance should bring two people closer together. The dance in this poem acts that way‚ yet the darker side of this waltz‚ which is a powerfully unsettling emotion under the surface of this poem‚ dominates the mood‚ and the love and intimacy of the dance do not make a strong impression on the reader. Theodore Roethke manipulates our emotional response
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the short scene‚ Sula‚ by Toni Morrison‚ there are several different elements of literature imbedded within the writing. First and foremost‚ there are two main characters within the plot. There is the protagonist‚ while the other is an example of a stereotypical black woman with many children‚ overall an innocent bystander in the plot. Both of these characters are being discriminated upon by the antagonist. There are other elements in the short scene‚ such as conflicts between characters‚ and a character
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Thesis 1 When first reading “My Papa’s Waltz” I got the impression of an abusive household where the father beats the son and the mother stands idly by allowing this to happen. After a couple more reads I saw the humor of the words explaining a clumsy waltz between a father and son. There are satiric words used leading many to believe that the son is being abused‚ but there are also contradictions in those words which leads in a different direction. My final direction is that the father is abusing
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Upon reading Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” one would think the poem entirely talks about the dance and how it was special and memorable to the speaker just by the title. However‚ this ‘waltz’ is interpreted many different ways in the poem. The poem starts off describing the speaker’s presumed father’s smell of “whiskey on your breath” to show that he was drinking heavily (Roethke 1). This smell can also be described as quite strong because of the fact that it “could make a small boy dizzy” (2). This
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