My Papa's Waltz

Reader response criticism is criticism where the reader evaluates a work based on their own highly individualistic personal responses that are filtered through personal recollections. Typically the response is a highly individualistic one because the reader’s own personality is examined in the interpretation. I know there are many readers who would construe My Papa’s Waltz as a poem dealing with child abuse perpetrated by the narrator’s father, but my own personal experience in the context of this poem proves this point to the contrary. I began asking myself, didn’t the modern reader who interpreted this poem in a much different fashion than I did, have recollections of their fathers? Didn’t these alarmist readers remember how they perceived life as children, through the guise of imaginative response? I remember seeing everything I viewed as a kid as having mysterious grandeur, probably because the normal responses that I have as an older individual were held into check at that time. Childhood was a wonderful period when anything was possible, and also where anything could at the same time have a dark connotation to it. This naiveté about the world, where one minute someone you greatly admire or love could be viewed in an evil guise for a short amount of time, is what made life exhilarating for me as a kid. It’s like a form of playacting where anyone could be anything at anytime. I know I viewed my father in that way sometimes, and I had full right to considering that he was and still is very macho. Is this the day and age to put down macho tendencies in men, all for the purposes of making males caring considerate ninnies?

I can distinctly remember my imaginative responses to my father when he would come home late from his job, which was ironically very minimum wage like in this particular poem. I swear that I can see him coming out of the darkness of our house’s living room, almost as if the boogey man were coming out of the shadows. What’s wrong with that? Why do readers have to associate a passage such as, “The hand that held my wrist/Was battered on one knuckle;/At every step you missed/My right ear scraped a buckle” (Roethke stanza 3), or, “You beat time on my head/With a palm caked hard by dirt… (Roethke stanza 4), as indications of an abusive relationship between father and son? I interpret these descriptions as the terrifying grandeur that the son in the poem views in terms of his father’s characteristics. The child and father are dancing to a waltz, and in this context it makes sense that he would keep time by banging on something. This banging on his son’s head might even be a form of affection, especially considering that father and son are dancing to a waltz.

I know that if I read this poem as a child, I would probably find reading it one of the great experiences of my life because it so accurately depicted my view of the world at that time. I know that during the evening I could have a relaxing time being with my mother, but once my father came home the night would be anything but calm, however enjoyable. When I was a child, there was almost an ambivalence about how I viewed my father because he was so different from my mother. The second stanza particularly strikes me as being very poignant in terms of my own responses as a reader. My father, instead of dancing in a waltz like fashion with me, would often give me piggy back rides and twirl me around until I got very dizzy, and yes we did, …romp…until the pans/Slid from the kitchen shelf,” and yes, “…My mother’s countenance/Could not unfrown itself…” (Roethke stanza 2). My father had a very rough nature, but he was not abusive in any way and I think the same could be said for the child’s father in the poem, or why else would he hang onto his father’s shirt by bedtime? This child obviously doesn’t want the night to end, or for his childhood to end either. It would not be proper to rough house with his father when he became a more “responsible” adult, and the child in the poem is aware of this fact. When modern readers interpret this poem in a more horrifying fashion, they actually make my memories clouded with doubt. The readers who view the father as being abusive in My Papa’s Waltz make the memories of my past obscure, which is a real disservice in my opinion.