Theodore
Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz": A Reader's
Response
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. Rarely has this set of expectations surprised
me as much, however, as it did in a recent discussion I had with students about
Theodore Roethke's poem "My
Papa's Waltz."
I was teaching the poem in a creative writing class,
on a day when we were talking about uses of metrical patterns in poetry. I went
into class prepared to discuss what I thought of as a tidy little poem that
does a particularly
good
job of replicating the cadence of a waltz in
the meter of its stanzas. I was shocked to find that most of my students, on the other hand, had an angry and
vehement reaction against a poem that they saw as describing systematic
child-abuse.
"Child-abuse?" I asked, mystified, and not sure I'd heard correctly.
Most of the heads in the class nodded. My
immediate thought was that my students must be
reading something into the poem that wasn't there, since the poem for me had
always conjured up a vivid image of a nighttime ritual that shows the
connection between father and son. In my
mind's eye, I saw a hard-
working
man who danced awkwardly but enthusiastically, creating a moment of intimacy
with his child. For me the poem's tone was one of fond recollection: that the
adult speaker still remembers small details of this waltzing suggested to me
that the child thoroughly enjoyed this dance.
But
my students were convinced that the father was
beating his son. I was so surprised by this unexpected understanding of the
poem that without even mentioning my reading,
I asked to hear the evidence for theirs. Most of them grimaced when they talked
about the poem, as
though
even discussing it was almost as offensive as the actions they felt it
portrayed. Their primary argument that this poem depicts a harsh father-son
relationship was that the description of the dancing is violent. The father
"beat time" on the child's head and crashed around the room so much
that "the pans / Slid from the kitchen shelf." The word
"beat," they said, is a clear
indication of abuse, and the fact that the child is held still by a hand that is
itself "battered" strengthened their sense that manual violence is
the subject of the poem. My students seemed to
be implying that no one would voluntarily use the word "beat" in the
context of an adult's relationship to a child unless intending to suggest child
abuse. The image of the father's belt buckle scraping the child's ear in the
third stanza confirmed for the class that the father uses whatever tools are
available to accomplish this beating.
The mother's stance contributes to this reading. She
is guilty of not preventing her husband from beating her son; she looks on but
doesn't interfere. Yet she doesn't condone it either, since we see that she
looks on with a "countenance [that] / Could not unfrown itself." Her stern disapproval of what is
going on seemed to my class to be further
evidence that the father is
acting
inappropriately with his child. In fact, the relationship between the mother
and the father in this poem reveals exactly the dynamic that we understand as
typical of abusive family situations: the ambivalence of one parent in effect
permits the other to perpetuate abuse on the children. Although my students did not articulate this concept of
ambivalence, their critiques of the mother's simultaneous disapproval and
inaction certainly point in this direction.
Furthermore, my
students claimed, the child doesn't appear to be enjoying himself in all of
this. He describes the "waltz" as
requiring him to hang on "like death" hardly a positive description
of something a little boy would welcome. For my
students, the specter of "death" raised in a poem that contains the
volatile word "beat" to describe the action of a father with his
son was
nearly conclusive proof for their reading of the poem. "Death" raises
the threatening reminder that child-abuse all too often has fatal consequences.
And if any doubts remain, the fact that the man is drunk tops it all off, one
student pointed out. The opening line of the poem
emphasizes his drunkenness by drawing our attention to the "whiskey" on
the father's breath as the very first detail we learn about him and his waltz. My class
didn't discuss this detail, as though merely pointing it out were enough. Heads
nodded affirmation as if the combination of "whiskey" on a father's
breath, a frowning mother, and a little boy nearly "dizzy" with all
the things whizzing by his head could lead to only one obvious conclusion: this
father, like so many
others
we've heard about on yet another drunken bender, is beating his son.
There was a long pause in the room after my class had finished their explanations. I'd always
understood "My Papa's
Waltz" as positive if not
downright nostalgic, so my students' reading
initially struck me as partly compelling but ultimately misguided. I said I'd
like to offer an alternate reading and then to evaluate both as a group: I had
always read "My Papa's
Waltz"
as
though the narrator was talking about a literal "waltz,"
and I imagined the scene looked something like this.
A hard-working father comes home after a long day
just in time for his son's bedtime. He
doesn't even take time to clean up (he still has "a palm caked hard by
dirt") because he wants to spend their few minutes together doing
something really fun. So, he dances his son around the little house. The word
"romped" in the second stanza signified for me that this was a
positive,
playful
experience, since it implies the kind of wild abandon of activity that small
children love.
Envisioning a heavy, awkward man romping through the
house with his small son, it was easy to see why a mother might frown at the
spectacle. It's nearly time for bed, and the father is doing everything to get
the son riled up rather than calmed down for sleep. The fact that the romping
dance
is even disrupting the order of the mother's "kitchen shelf" surely
contributes to her frowning countenance. I was struck, as my
students had been, by the fact that although she seems to disapprove, she does
nothing to stop this waltzing. For me, this suggested that although she didn't
appreciate the disruptive qualities of the dance, she didn't want to hinder the
father-son bond the moment was creating.
As for the belt buckle, I remember my
own childhood, dancing with my father: in my socks, I would stand on the tops of his feet, and
he would dance me awkwardly around the room while I clung to his hands or held
fistfuls of the back of his shirt.
I saw several students nod as if
they
too remembered such dancing. In such a posture, I suggested, the boy's head
would be at his father's waist-level, so that whenever his father
"missed" a step or lost his balance, the boy's "right ear
scraped a buckle" on the father's belt. The last two lines of the poem
confirm that this is the relative position of father and son, as the boy
recalls that his father "waltzed me off to bed / Still
clinging to your shirt." In the context of this kind of dancing, the
notion that the child is
"clinging" to his father suggests both that he depends
on his father and that he has a childish reaction to the threat that the
dancing will end because of bedtime.
Thinking
of this poem as describing real attempts at dancing helps me account not only
for the idea of the father's "missed" steps but also for his efforts
to "beat time" to music he's apparently humming or imagining as they
dance. I am unwilling to separate the word "beat," which so troubled my class, from the noun that follows it.
As
I read this poem, the father is not beating his son, according to line 13, he's beating time on the son's head. Assuming the
waltzing of the poem is not a metaphor for anything else, to "beat
time" simply means that he's
trying
to keep the rhythm of the dance steady. The poem for me creates a wonderful
juxtaposition
in the image of a man whose hands are dirty and "battered" by hard
physical labor trying to use those same hands to tap out the rhythm of a waltz on his small son's head. Furthermore, that juxtaposition illuminates
why the poem opens by drawing attention to the man's "whiskey"
breath. From the very beginning of the poem, we learn that "My Papa's Waltz" is a dance that defies what we expect
from waltzing. The waltz conjures up images of
well-dressed people dancing sedately in grand ballrooms wearing fancy clothes.
The formality
of the
simple rhythm is as old-fashioned as it is controlled. To title the poem with
the word waltz is to set the reader up to
expect precisely the opposite of an evening romp in a modest house, led by a
whiskey-drinking father. That "My Papa"
can both waltz and hold his whiskey thus
immediately alerts the reader that this poem will revise the idea of waltzing
without
completely losing it. The lines, after all, do an excellent job of mimicking the
3/4 time of the waltz in their stresses and
timing.
Yet the details of this waltz
contradict nearly all of our
expectations about who does this dance, when, and where. For me, that contradiction
does a lot to create interest in the poem.
My
reading of this poem, as essentially a fond boyhood memory so contradicted my students' impression of violence that most of
them were unwilling to relinquish their understanding of the poem. So we began
a class discussion to try to work through what was most and least convincing
about each of our interpretations.
First, my students
claimed, they didn't think that my reading
adequately dealt with the issue of the father's drunkenness-which seemed to
them to be such a large factor in proving he was abusing his son. Suddenly, the
motivation for their reading of the poem started to become more apparent. My students'
vehement
responses to the abuse they perceived in this poem derived largely from their
cultural position as readers raised in the last decades of the 20th century. Our country has become
increasingly intolerant of alcohol abuse as it has become more aware that alcohol
can be abused. The links between
alcoholism and child-abuse are widely documented now, although the subject was
nearly unheard-of when this poem was written in 1948. Written at a time when to
have a drink was still macho and when the dynamics that lead to child abuse
were far from public knowledge, "My Papa's Waltz"
imagines an ideal reader very different from the college students
of the
late 1990s, who are conditioned to notice even the slightest hints of abuse and
alcoholism and to view them as glaring signs of problems.
I tried to draw the class's attention to the historical
issues at stake in reading a poem written 50 years ago according to prevailing assumptions
and stereotypes. And ultimately, we agreed to disagree on what the more compelling
reading of the poem was. However, that
solution-of assuming both our readings must be equally valid and allowed to
stand as separate entities-left me unsatisfied. I felt that there were portions
of my students' arguments that simply didn't
make sense with the poem as a whole, such as their heavy emphasis on the word
"beat" which didn't acknowledge the fact that the line specifically mentions
the father beating "time." Simultaneously, however, their strong
sense that the poem
contain
violence helped explain some things that my
reading didn't take into account. Most notably, the third line of the poem,
"But I hung on like death," had always troubled me as an oddly
negative description in what otherwise seemed to me to be a poem about a
positive memory. Considering the abuse reading of this poem raised interesting
issues that complicated my understanding of
it.
Just as I was intrigued by the juxtaposition of a
rough worker waltzing, I
was
interested in the violence that I thought my
students very astutely pointed out throughout the whole poem. Although this
moment of waltzing with papa still seems to me a positive memory, there is also
something vaguely frightening in it. The whiskey breath and dizzying speed, the
powerful
father whom the mother cannot criticize, and the noisy, beating romp of this waltz all combine to suggest an activity that is
exhilarating perhaps BECAUSE it is somewhat frightening. Children, after all, are often most impressed
by things that scare and thrill them at the same time.
Considering my
students' sense that violence is being done to the son in this poem thus modifies
my own reading in a way that I think makes it
more compelling. This childhood memory, of a kind of dancing that "was not
easy" but was thrilling, creates an image of a child at once delighted and
frightened by the power of his father. Physically, the father's tight hold on the
child's wrist is mirrored by the child's "clinging to [the father's]
shirt," giving us an image of
fatherly
power that can't be resisted, but that the child also doesn't want to resist.
Thus while I see
no evidence in the poem that the child is actually being beaten, I see many
details that suggest a kind of danger in this dancing and hint at underlying
violence. A reader must wonder what caused the father's hand to be
"battered on one knuckle," for example. Was he injured in
his
work, or did he hurt himself in a fight or punching a wall in anger? As I
re-read this poem, it seems that the threat of powerful masculinity is kept in
check by the controlled rhythm of the waltz
and by the father's desire to maintain an intimacy with his son. For if in 1948
the whiskey on his breath might have been less stigmatized as a sign of
maltreatment, the fact that he waltzes
his son
off to tuck him in bed might have been even more noticeable as an extraordinary
moment of connection.
I wish I could say that in my
classroom we talked about how to fit these two readings together by modifying
portions of each to reflect the other. In fact, we chose to decide that there were
two equally-valid responses rather than working to produce a new, unified
interpretation. It nevertheless strikes me as especially satisfying to have my own reading of a poem so radically
challenged by my students and to have their
reading push me to account for issues I'd never
considered within this poem before. At its very best, this is the benefit of
reader-response criticism as I see it. Rather than providing a forum for
free-for-all interpretation, it allows individual, emotional responses to be
channeled into considered readings of a text that take into account the
historical positions of both the reader and the writer and enable a valuable complexity
of understanding.