Another line would be “Was battered on one knuckle” this is another method to identify bodily harm. The dance itself symbolize love between the son and father but also power and fear between the two. Roethke allows each reader to have different emotions with the way he applied his symbolism. Even though the author showed happy moments because of the dance but with the father being drunk and very power towards the son showed signs of
The principle irony of this story is that the son was sent along to keep the father from getting drunk, and in the end, the son was the one who ended up getting drunk. It is also ironic that the mother was thankful her son got drunk rather than his father. Ideally, the mother would be upset that her underage child got drunk. 7. This story is told in retrospect, from the perspective of a man looking back on his childhood.
The Father could be mistaken as a drunk or abusive, Due to lines such as “ The Whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy.” (1-2) But is later affirmed to be the opposite with the young boy telling us “I hung on like death.” (3) Allowing us to know he doesn’t in fact want to let go. This is not in fear for his life which the word “death implies” but it is caused by the young boy wanting to continue and have fun with his father. As each stanza progresses we can further see the unconditional love between Father and Son. The young boy’s feelings and love for his father can be better illustrated by Theodore Roethke’s imagery, when we read more in depth; Roethke shows us a young boy having a joyous time wile trying to avoid being put to bed in My Papa’s Waltz. We can begin to better understand this relationship by digging deeper into the poem itself and examining each stanza, line and even word.
Keller knew how Paul’s music would sound like and crushed Paul’s smugness about his ability, which was less accomplished than he believed. Paul thought of it as an insult and a waste of his time, as reflected by his strong opinion expressed with frustration to his father after the first lesson that, “He practically broke my arm… He’s a sadist,” when he complained to his parents. Knowing that Paul was an arrogant teenager who had been praised too much, Keller tried to teach him more than just the mastery of the piano, but how his attitude should be. Although Paul did not receive Keller’s message, later on he realized how much Keller had taught
The 'small boy'(Booth line 2) is talking directly to his father. This, in the positive readers eyes, evokes a feeling of intimacy between the two characters. In the mean time, the fathers breath making the boy dizzy gives ammo to the readers who believe the poem is about domestic abuse. For them, this line indicates that the father was not drinking socially, but drinking oppressively to the point of abusing the whiskey. The readers that see no abuse in the poem retaliate that the boy becoming dizzy is a realistic description of the two figures being close physically, and dancing around in circles as they attempt to
The Differences of the Sons When I read the two different works, I noticed that the author illustrate the two works in different ways, just like Phaedra is a tragedy but Tartuffe is a comedy; the father in Phaedra is not as stupid as the father in the Tartuffe; Phaedra dead in the end of her story but the author didn't do anything to Elmire. However, there are also many similarities in both stories, there sons were trying to help; there stepmothers were doing something bad when their husbands are not around them; and both of the fathers were cheated by someone. The characters which I truly want to talk about are the two sons: Hippolytus and Damis. When we focus on the two characters, as I said, we will find many similarities in the surface, but I prefer to discuss their differences which hide deeper in the story. Hippolytus, the prince who has forbidden love with a capture, when audiences first met him, he was talking about leaving his place to find his father.
No one really cared about him, so he built up walls with drinking and now Katniss and Peeta break them down and help him. On the train ride over to the capitol he is drunk when he should be giving advice to his tributes on how to stay alive in the games. Once he realizes they had a fighting chance this year and were not automatically written off as usual, he managed to focus on helping them instead of drinking. This helps Haymitch by giving him something to focus on as well as focusing on people who care for him. In the film The Hunger Games: Catching Fire his drinking is not as prevalent because he now has Katniss and Peeta who care enough about him to try and help him stay sober.
Why do we have to pay for other peoples mistakes? In the book “Flight” by Sherman Alexie Zits deals with many disappointments in life. One of his biggest disappointments is not having a father or someone that loves him like he wants to be love, “My father was a drunk, too more in love with beer and vodka than with my mother and me. He vanished like a cruel magician about two minutes after I was born” (Alexie4). This most of been hard for him to know that his dad didn’t care for him and that he only cared about his beer and vodka.
Fong further writes that if the poem is quoted at all, it is to mention “the father’s “mixture of tenderness and brutality” and the child’s “admiration and fear” (1990). Theodore however uses imagery very effectively as a poetic device to increase sensitivity in “My Papa’s Waltz,” and precise language to develop this poem. I would tend to believe that if there was any fear it would be the natural fear a child would experience like when spinning around; the fear that they would trip and fall down. Lines five and six, “We romped until the pans/Slid from the kitchen shelf” show an example of how the image is a well-defined, giving description of ideas undergone and realized through the senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste (as cited in Clugston, 2010). Understanding the poem was not easy at first because of my own negative personal experiences.
Poetry is made to express the feelings, thoughts, and emotions of the poet. The reader can interpret the poem however they see fit. The poem is open to many interpretations the readers seem fit. In the poem “My Papa’s Waltz” written by Theodore Roethke, individuals who recall the memory of an abusive relationship with their parent often feel resentment towards them as adults. Careful analysis of each individual stanza backs up the theory of child abuse by a violent and drunken father.