My Papa's Waltz

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Motifs

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Literary Devices Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major.

Dancing

Unsurprisingly, given that it’s framed through the extended metaphor of a waltz, the poem features numerous references to dancing. The references begin in the opening stanza, where the speaker implies that his father is such a wild “dance” partner that he had to “[hang] on like death: / Such waltzing was not easy” (lines 3–4). Additional references appear in lines 9–12, where the speaker describes him and his father as if they are locked in an unstable partner dance:

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

The first two lines of this stanza suggest the traditional embrace of the dancers, where the “lead” dancer (traditionally male) has one hand on the waist of the “follow” (traditionally female) and uses the other to holds the follow’s hand. Here, the father grasps his’s son’s wrist rather than his hand, which signals that something’s wrong with this dance. The speaker goes on to describe the discombobulation he felt “at every step [his father] missed.” So drunk is the man that he can’t manage the “steps” the choreography demands. Finally, in an image that conflates violence and dance, the poem’s final stanza features a reference to the speaker’s father “beat[ing] time on [his] head” (lines 13) to keep up the tempo.

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