Roethke's 'My Papa's Waltz': A Psychological Assault, Exams of Dance

Download Roethke's 'My Papa's Waltz': A Psychological Assault and more Exams Dance in PDF only on Docsity! 66 Community College Humanities Review Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz": A Waltz Macabre by Eli Merchant The dread experienced by the child in Theodore Roethke’s poem, “My Papa’s Waltz” is not immediately apparent, at least not on a first reading, particularly in view of the poem’s smooth measured cadences, the neutral tone it takes to its narrative material, and the formalism characterizing its versification. In vain do we look for the prosodic irregularity (as we might in a Dickinson poem) that would dramatize the inner emotional dissonance and chaos. This dissociation between experience and affect makes it difficult to read the emotional impact of the events described in the poem either on the child as they occurred or on the narrator from the perspective of later years. The poem is divided into four quatrains, each of which corresponds neatly to each stage of the narrative, from the moment when the father waltzes with the boy to the point when he puts him to bed clinging to his shirt. The iambic meter, with three iambs to the line, and the rhyme scheme abab, where the first and third and second and fourth lines rhyme, are consistently maintained throughout the poem except for a few terminal unaccented syllables and feminine rhymes at the end of some of the lines. The syntax is easy to follow, without the caesural breaks, syntactical convolutions or erratic punctuation that simultaneously bedazzle and befuddle the Dickinson reader at the edge of conscious thought and rational speech. The imagery is subdued, with negatives (“Such waltzing was not easy”) and subjunctive mood (“The whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy”) mitigating its impact.1 Yet the impression is hard to avoid that something traumatic has left a permanent scar on the child’s psyche, as portrayed through sinister word choices (“hung on like death”), the emphasis on stark physical details, (i.e., the whiskeyed breath, the battered knuckle), and the compelling need to apostrophize the father (the “you” of the poem). The narrative facts are simple and few. The father (“papa”) comes home drunk seemingly after a hard day’s work and possibly a bout at the bar, and begins the waltz with the son that gives the poem its title. The dance is erratic as the father lurches and his belt buckle scrapes the son’s 67Spring 2017 My Papa's Waltz The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother’s countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt. ear, while his palm “caked hard by dirt” beats time on the boy’s head. The dance takes the pair into the kitchen causing the shelved pans to slide with the mother demonstrating her no uncertain displeasure, and ends as abruptly as it began when the father waltzes his son off to bed. What appears to be at play in causing the son’s dread is that the dance represents a psychological rather than physical assault. Judging by his height (he reaches the father’s belt buckle), and general helplessness, the son is probably between three and five, an important stage in his development when he is involved with both parents, develops a sense of masculine identity, and endeavors to reconcile the masculine and feminine aspects of his identity.2 When the drunken father dances with him and stimulates him by contact with his bodily parts—the calloused hands, the whiskeyed breath, the belt buckle (close to the genital area)—he subverts his son’s budding manhood, foisting an essentially feminine identification on him.3 The reference to the kitchen where the pans are shelved, the mother’s domain, strategically advances this feminine identification, symbolically and thematically, particularly in view of the year of the poem’s publication, 1949. The child is being subjected to an excess of erotic stimulation that overwhelms his psyche and exceeds what his ego can sustain, anticipate or cope with. What complicates the situation is that on some level, given the fluidity and ambiguity of his gender identification, the boy may enjoy the waltz and the stimulating fatherly attention it involves. Witness the syntactical change in the second stanza from the second person singular “you” to the first person plural “we,” reflecting a more active and robust collaboration: We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; Hence the mother’s stern rigid reaction, whose “countenance could not unfrown itself,” similarly seared into the narrator’s memory can be seen from the child’s perspective as a reproach for colluding to displace her in the spousal relation and usurp her feminine function, undermining the stability of the domestic situation. Although the poem concludes with the child’s being waltzed off to bed, it is not clear given the ambiguous meaning of the word “bed” whether this in fact represents the cessation of the evening’s frenetic actions or their escalation to an even more intensely stimulative level.4 What renders the situation difficult to decode is that it resembles the kind of roughhousing or horse playing in which many fathers and sons engage.5 But a crucial difference has to be recognized. The sober father who engages in this activity is conscious of his surroundings and sensitive to his child’s emotions, and thus he can choreograph the steps within well defined limits, exercising his parental role and function even during play. Above all, he can demarcate