Tuesday, January 20, 2009
"My Papa's Waltz"
I believe this poem is about happy memories between a young boy and his father. He describes his father coming home from a hard day of work and dancing with him after a few drinks. This idea is influenced by the the wiskey on the fathers breath and his tough, stale hands which show his father was hard working. I believe this shows a common lifestyle of the average mid-western back in the day. He gives the reader a good visual image of the occasion. He describes him and his dad waltzing (dancing) around the kitchen knocking over all the pans while his mom is grinning. I also believe this poem shows that the boy only had a little bit of time to spend with his father on the weekdays, but his father made the most of their time together. At the end of the poem the father gives the son a gentle pad on the head and takes him to bed.
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I agree with Travis that this is a good poem rather than a negative one. I think that the whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy just means that the father had a few drinks and it does not mean that he was a raging drunk. Then the poem goes on to say We romped until the pans slid from the kitchen shelf my mothers countenance could not upfront itself which I interpret to mean that they were playing around and dancing and knocking things over and the mother was getting frustrated with this. I think that the next line which says the hand that held my wrist just means that the father was holding the child's arm while they were dancing but not in an aggressive manor. The next part of the poem You beat time on my head with a palm caked hard by dirt then waltzed me off to bed still clinging to your shirt just means that the father taped the child on the head telling him/her that it was bed time and then took him/her there as the child was still clinging to the fathers shirt still wanting to dance and play. The reason that I don’t take this poem in an aggressive measure is because when I was a younger my dad would always come home and have two or three screwdrivers and then we would always wrestle around until my mom would yell at us to calm down.
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