"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath                      1
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans                        5
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist                      9
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head                        13
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

I chose to read and analyze "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke because, let's be honest, it was the shortest.  But as I read it, I discovered that it was a good choice for many other reasons.  One thing that I always like for poems to do is rhyme, and this poem does a very good job with that.  When we first began to read poetry in elementary school, we were taught that poetry had to rhyme; that that was basically what a poem was--something that rhymed.  If a poem rhymes, it is much easier to read because it has a nice 'flowy' sound to it, and you can almost read it as if it were a song.  The rhyme scheme in this poem is a-b-a-c-d-e-f-e-g-h-g-h-i-j-i-j.  This tells us that about every other line in the poem is a rhyme.  Another element of sound that really stood out to me was the pattern of syllables.  Each line of the poem begins with a word that is one syllable.  The syllable pattern in the first and second stanzas is 6,7,6,7.  In the third stanza, it is 6,6,6,6.  The pattern for the fourth is 6,7,6,6.  While some of the stanzas may have slightly different syllable patterns, they are all generally the same.  The tense of the poem also stood out to me in terms of what the poem sounded like.  Words such as "romped", "battered", "scraped", and "waltzed", words that all end in "ed", tell us that it is written in the past tense.

Since we started the poetry unit, I have been introduced to many new poetry terms, which I was able to recognize and apply in this poem.  One main thing that we have pointed out a lot while reading poetry is "enjambment", or line breaks in the middle of a phrase.  There are examples of enjambment in stanzas 2, 3, and 4.  In stanza two, it is between "pans" & "slid"(lines 5-6), and "countenance" & "could"(lines 7-8).  In stanza three, it is between "wrist" & "was"(lines 9-10), and "missed" & "my"(lines 11-12).  In stanza four, it is between "head" & "with"(lines 13-14), and "bed" & "still"(lines 15-16).  The enjambment always falls between the first and last words of the lines.  Similes and personification were two main parts of speech that I found in this poem.  "But I hung on like death" (line 3) is the simile, and "my mother's countenance" is being personified in line 7 because it is described as being unable to "frown on itself."  I was confused when the word "unfrown" was used in line 8 because when I looked it up in the dictionary it could not be found;  I wonder why the author used a word that doesn't really exist.

The usage of imagery was also very clear and interesting to me in this poem.  There were many examples of it, but one particular one was in line 10: "battered on one knuckle."  This is referring to the wrist of the person the author is dancing with (probably an adult since it said they were drinking whisky in the first line of the poem.)  When I read this, I imagined a big hand with scrapes and cuts all over it.  I also pictured a bandage on the hand covering a wound.  Punctuation is not something that tends to really stand out in poetry, but it definitely caught my eye in this poem.  The first time I read through the poem, I noticed that the second line of each stanza ended with a semicolon, and the last line ended with a period.  But as a looked more closely, I noticed that this was not the way each stanza was structured.  In the first stanza, line three ends with a colon.  In stanza four, the second line ends with a comma, rather than a semicolon.
As a result of analyzing and looking more closely at this poem, I became more aware of small things in the poem that I probably wouldn't have noticed before.