My Papa's Waltz -Poem #3

The whiskey on your breath   

Could make a small boy dizzy;   

But I hung on like death:   

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans   

Slid from the kitchen shelf;   

My mother’s countenance   

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist   

Was battered on one knuckle;   

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head   

With a palm caked hard by dirt,   

Then waltzed me off to bed   

Still clinging to your shirt.

I really enjoyed the poem My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke, with the account of getting a memory with my father. My dad doesn't drink but he always used to dance and sing to me when I was younger. Which is what I loved about him; that he didn't care what others thought. Anyway, at first read through I thought that the story was about a dad who had gotten drunk and ended up beating the mother and son by the line "you beat time on my head." But the whole poem consists of just the father dancing with his son. I enjoy the imagery used through the poem which gave me a better image and understanding when reading it multiple times. I could see when the narrator used "the whiskey on your breathe could make a small boy dizzy," telling us that the child hates the smell of alcohol, which is making him sick. In a more deeper thought past that idea, i wanted to know if the author wrote this poem from his childhood? Was this poem about him dancing with his father? That's just my idea with the amount of detail put in 4 stanzas. With the imagery I could see that the child doesn't know what to do while dancing with the father, and the mother is happy to see them waltzing through the kitchen. I really enjoyed this because it was heartfelt and relatable that I didn't have when reading the previous poems. It got me to unlock those innocent child memories that used to make me happy. It makes the school year a little bit less stressful then it is.