My Papa's Waltz

After reading My Papa’s Waltz, two different views of the poem develop pretty quickly. The first being that the poem is about child abuse and the other is about a hardworking father and the playful manner he has with his son. I think that the development of the poem being about child abuse has come with time. This poem was written in the 1940s when child abuse happened but, was not as publicized in media as it is today. So I think that through the media influences on our daily lives this poem has been constantly interpreted into a poem about a father beating his child. The view that it is about child abuse can’t be immediately thrown out. When the poem uses “romped” the author uses it very loosely allowing for the reader to interpret it in any form that they choose. Then when he mentioned “the mother’s countenance that could not be unfrowned”, you picture a woman standing in the corner unable to stop the child from being beat due to her own fear and insecurity. The author of this poem had a very unique choice of vocabulary that left the reader in question what this poem was really about.

The more I read it though I began to believe that the poem was about a hard working father and his playful manner he had with his son. “But I hung on like death” means to me that his father came home tired from work and despite the strong smell of his breath he was happy to see him and was not ready to let him go. I also believe that his father was glad to see him and might have been a little too aggressive while twirling or walking him around. The waltz that they took was not easy because his father was very tired and probably had little energy left. His “mother countenance could not be unfrowned”, because she missed her husband or either because the father and son were making a mess while making their way through the kitchen. I believe his hand was battered on one knuckle to symbolize how hard he worked to take care of his family. The buckle that the boy’s right ear scraped showed that the labor that his father did was tough and that him and his father played really rough. “With a palm caked hard by dirt” meant that he worked with dirt to provide for his family and he never left them without food and shelter. Then the child hung on to his father as he went to bed with showed the love between the two. So in my opinion the poem represented a child and his father in the working class culture of the 1940s.

I believe that the time has changed the purpose of this poem from the love between a working class father and his son to child abuse. The more you read it the more the poem sounds like the author may have been describing the relationship between him and his father or what he saw daily. I loved this poem because it was open to many interpretations.