My Papa’s Waltz

 My Papa’s Waltz

By Theodore Roethke

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.

[Theodore Roethke, "My Papa's Waltz" from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.  Copyright 1942 by Heast Magazines, Inc.  Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.]

1. What "sensory details"  (smell, taste, sound, touch) do you notice in the poem (at least 3)?

2. What effect do you think those specific sensory details have on the poem (In other words, how do those details affect the way you understand or relate to the poem)?

3. The narrator is telling us about a scene from his childhood. How do you think the narrator feels about his father, looking back on those memories? What details make you think that?