Explication-_MY_Papas_Waltz

Explication- MY Papas Waltz Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” is a fixed form poem of sixteen lines. Roethke created the rhyme scheme abab, cdcd, efef, ghgh. Roethke uses this rhyme scheme to make it sound as if the poem is a waltz. The rhyme scheme gives the poem a beat. Each stanza is made up of four lines, which the first and third lines rhyme, and the second and fourth lines rhyme. The poem, in first person point of view, describes a small boy who is dancing with his drunken father in the kitchen. The small boy’s mother is upset with the father (7-8). The images in the poem include the boy’s father stumbling around, and the small boy thinks he and his father are dancing. Another image the poem leaves is the father’s hands “battered on one knuckle” and “caked hard by poem, father, boy, small, rhyme, roethke, lines, dancing, waltz, scheme, image, around, while, tone, sad, mother, make, leaves, hard, first, father’s, drunken, boy’s, being, bed, battered, workingman, words, wife, view, upset, thought, third, thinks, theodore, stumbling