The whiskey on your breath   
Could make a small boy dizzy.

These two opening lines are significant for the way they undermine the tone implied by the poem’s jaunty title. Whereas “My Papa’s Waltz” frames the poem as a spirited partner dance, these opening lines instantly reveal an underlying tension. Similarly, the speaker’s father isn’t as warm and approachable as the word “papa” might suggest. Instead, he clearly drinks too much and reeks of alcohol. The father’s breath is so intense, in fact, that it “Could make a small boy dizzy.” With this line, the speaker affirms the sense of danger he felt as a boy. Yet the way the speaker phrases this line also conveys a cheeky sense of humor. After establishing the father’s menacing presence in the first line, the speaker indulges in overstatement to claim that the man’s breath was so strong it could make “a small boy” drunk by proxy. This strategy does two things. Firstly, the phrase “a small boy” subtly distances the speaker from the little boy he once was, creating greater psychological distance from the trauma he’s recounting. Secondly, and relatedly, the line as a whole shifts the emphasis from the boy’s experience to the father’s drunkenness, clearly highlighting his cruelty.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;   
My mother’s countenance   
Could not unfrown itself.

“My Papa’s Waltz” centers on a tense relationship between a boy and his father, but it’s notable that a feminine presence appears in lines 5–8.  Most obviously, the feminine presence relates to the speaker’s mother, who appears to observe the altercation between father and son without intervening. The speaker captures her sense of powerlessness in the strangely disembodied image of her frowning face. So powerless is she that her own frown “could not unfrown itself.” In addition to the explicit reference to his mother, the speaker also implies that the “waltz” with his father was physically violent enough to cause kitchen pans to clatter from their shelves. Here, male violence is shown to have a destructive effect on the kitchen, which in the midcentury United States was still strongly considered a mother’s domain. The pans symbolize the stereotypically feminine labor of cooking and nourishment of the family. The fact that even the pans have clattered to the ground indicates a collapse at the heart of this family.

You beat time on my head   
With a palm caked hard by dirt.

Lines 13–14 offer the closest thing to an explicit acknowledgement of violence in the poem. Throughout the first three stanzas, the speaker makes various indirect references to the violence of the altercation between father and son. For instance, in the first stanza the speaker implies that the “waltz” with his father was so wild he had to “[hang] on like death” (line 3). In the second stanza, he indirectly suggests that his father treated him so roughly that pans fell off their shelves in the kitchen. Then, in the third stanza, the speaker mentions how the hand holding his wrist “was battered on one knuckle” (line 10), though the source of that battering remains undisclosed. Only in the final stanza does the speaker refer directly to his father “beat[ing] time on [his] head.” Even here, however, the image of his father beating him “with a palm caked hard by dirt” is conflated with keeping up with the waltz’s quick tempo. In this way, the speaker still doesn’t come out fully and say his father was physically abusing him. Rather, he suggests that he was just maintaining the rhythm of the dance.

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