My Papa's Waltz: Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Pans

In lines 5–6, the speaker recounts how the rough physicality of the altercation with his father caused pans to fall in the kitchen:

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf.

In the kind of domestic environment where the poem takes place, pans like these symbolize care for the family. After all, pans are used for cooking the meals that nourish and sustain the household. But the pans in the poem have been disturbed from their place on the kitchen shelves, and they have clattered violently to the floor. In this case, then, the pans symbolize not the care the nourishes the family, but rather the destabilizing violence that threatens to destroy the family. It’s also important to note that insofar as they’re linked to cooking, which at the time the poem takes place was largely associated with the mother in a nuclear family, the pans are symbolically linked to the speaker’s mother and her failure to stop the violence. Just as the pans “fail” in their duty by falling to the ground and so don’t function as cookware, the speaker’s mother “fails” in the way she witnesses the violence but doesn’t intervene.

“My mother’s countenance”

In the second stanza, the speaker makes a reference to his mother, who is apparently watching the scene without intervening in it. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t reference his mother so much as her facial expression (lines 7–8):

My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

Detached from her person in this way, his “mother’s countenance” becomes a symbol for the sense of powerlessness that arises in the face of patriarchal masculinity. As the traditional head of the household, the father has the implicit right to punish his children as he sees fit. Whether the mother agrees with this logic or not, she remains a bystander in this scene. Indeed, she feels so powerless that she’s not even able to change her own facial expression, which refuses to “unfrown itself.” The speaker may reference his mother to convey his resentment about her inaction. Yet as the poem makes clear throughout, he was equally powerless to stop his father’s abuse. In this regard, the speaker was in control of his body as much as his mother was in control of her countenance.

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