The poem My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke is very heavily toned. It is a poem where the poet discretely combines dancing with the beating of a child. Roethke uses rhyming, first person and sentences that have duel meaning to add to this poems dark tone.
The rhyming in this poem could throw anyone off at first glance. Many relate rhyming to nursery rhymes. However this poem is not one for a child. It uses very harsh words to rhyme like “breath” and “death” or “knuckle” and “buckle”. This adds to the true meaning of the poem which is not about dancing but about the father of the speaker beating him up. The rhyming also gives the reader a sense of childhood. The ababcdcd rhyme scheme could bring the reader back in time to a child’s view and giving the reader a sense that the speaker is actually a child.
The poem is in first person. This adds to the feeling the reader will get of fear and sorrow. The poet used first person to make the experience seem more real and more fluid like an actual dance. When the poem is read in first person the experience of the beating comes out to sound more like a dance. The poem is also made from the son’s view. The reader is the put in the seat of the abuser. This is because the speaker is saying “the whisky on your breath” and using the term you. This pulls the reader into the poem more as the reader doesn’t notice that the narrator is referring to them as his father.
Lines in this poem could have duel meanings. The lines dance back and forth, from lines that make it sound like their dancing to lines that you know that the father is beating the speaker. An example of one of the duel lines is “Then waltzed me off to bed/ still clinging to your shirt.” This could mean that the father was dancing with his son till the son had to go to bed. That the father was the leader and the son was the follower in the dance. Yet it could also and most likely mean that the father was beating the son to the point that the son couldn’t do anything but give up and hold on to the father’s shirt as he was hauled up to bed.
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Taylor, You make some good point. I think where you want to focus is on the definition of the poem's tone. If you spend your time determinng what you feel that tone is and then search the poem for those words, phrases, lines that got you to thinking that, it will be easier to argue the point. Put the time to make a very clear determination of tone. In this case, the first line is too vague. "Heavily toned" is too difficult to argue clearly, because it is not concrete enough.
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