The American poet Theodore Roethke first published the poem “My Papa’s Waltz” in his 1948 collection, The Lost Son and Other Poems. In this collection, Roethke’s second, the poet mined his own childhood experiences for material, often tackling dark and painful subjects. In “My Papa’s Waltz,” Roethke investigates grisly themes such as domestic abuse and patriarchal masculinity. These themes play out in an altercation that took place between the poem’s speaker and his father when he was a boy. Yet despite the poem’s dark themes, the speaker adopts a somewhat cheeky tone that hides a deeply felt bitterness under a thick layer of irony. The speaker’s cheekiness begins in the title, which frames the poem as a “waltz”—that is, as a form of partner dance performed to music written in triple time. And indeed, the poem formally mimics the waltz, particularly in the three-beat rhythm of iambic trimeter. But as the reader quickly finds out, the waltz functions as an extended metaphor that only partially conceals the real violence that unfolds between father and son. Though as a child he was powerless, the speaker, now an adult, takes control of his own traumatic memory through the power of poetry.

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