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    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz"
    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz"
    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz"
    Ebook29 pages20 minutes

    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535829274
    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz"

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      it was so interesting reading this poem I got a lot of information about it.

    Book preview

    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" - Gale

    3

    My Papa’s Waltz

    Theodore Roethke

    1948

    Introduction

    My Papa’s Waltz was first published in 1948 in The Lost Son and Other Poems, a collection in which Roethke traces his growth from childhood to maturity. Outwardly, it is a simple poem: four quatrains of alternating rhyme recalling an incident from childhood. But this simplicity belies Roethke’s complex interweaving of disparate emotions and moods. A fond reminiscence of a comic dance of a father and his son, it is also a critique of the father’s coarseness and drunkenness.

    Roethke’s relationship to his father appears to have been a complicated one. A German immigrant who ran a successful floral business, Otto Roethke was a demanding parent who required perfection of the son who idolized him. When the elder Roethke died of cancer when his son was in high school, the boy appears to have been left with many unresolved and conflicting emotions about his father. My Papa’s Waltz seems in some respects to be an attempt on Roethke’s part to come to terms with his feelings. In the poem, the father appears as a god-like giant to his son. (The boy’s ear comes up only to the father’s belt buckle.) He comes across as a figure of misrule, drunk, romping, disrupting his wife’s kitchen, unable to follow the steps of the dance. While such a figure has its comic aspects, it has a threatening side as well. The boy is clearly overwhelmed; he is made dizzy by his father and hangs onto him like death. He is injured, scraped by the father’s buckle. The mother looks

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