My Papa's Waltz

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An Abused Son’s love for his Abuser There is nothing worse than a child who suffers from a parent’s intoxication. They don’t act the same towards you as they would sober and sometimes they can say or do harmful things that they don’t mean. When a parent is intoxicated around a child it makes it hard for the child to react to it because the child loves the parent and doesn’t want to say or do mean things back to them. Reacting to a situation like this is especially hard at a young age because this is the time that you look up to your parents the most. In “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, the narrator goes through this experience as a young boy. Even though the narrator’s father is intoxicated and abuses him physically, the boy still loves him unconditionally and craves his affection. In the first stanza the narrator explains that his father is inebriated and when he says that “The whiskey on his breath, could make a small boy dizzy” (lines 1-2) he is using an implied metaphor to idealize to the reader the level of his drunkenness. The simile “But he hung on like death” shows that the boy is holding his father tightly. Even though the father is intoxicated, he still wants to show affection towards the boy. In the last line of the stanza the author says “such waltzing was not easy” (line 4). Even though the boy loves his father, seeing him drunk can’t be easy for him. The denotation meaning of the line is that the boy struggles to walk hand in hand with his father because of the father’s intoxication and unpredictable stumbling. In the poem the word “waltz” is used in the title and throughout the stanzas. Waltz is a dance, but it has a different connotation meaning in this poem. When to partners waltz there is usually affection that is expressed between the two. This connotation meaning can fit into this poem because both father and son were showing

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