Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" offers an intricate exploration of childhood experiences, providing fertile ground for an analysis essay of "My Papa's Waltz" . Theodore Roethke's poem “My Papa's Waltz” is told from the point of view of a child who has to experience his father's actions while drunk. This poem touches on the issue of child abuse as the poem goes on to describe the acts of violence of a father towards his son The poem does not make the story more enjoyable as it states the true events that happened without sugarcoating any of the information This poem gives insight into the life this child has to constantly live and the terrible effects alcohol can cause to a family with an alcoholic parent. Say No to Plagiarism Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned” Get an Original Essay The first stanza of the poem introduces the context of the events that happen next. forward in the story. Throughout the poem, the author uses end rhyme to emphasize the events that take place. In the first stanza, for example, the author rhymes “breath” with “death.” The speaker says "But I hung on like a dead man": to express how he feels breathing the toxic smell of his father's alcoholic breath and uses a simile to highlight the fact that it is so difficult to breathe with the smell of whiskey that invades his senses. The author uses this figurative language to compare the speaker's situation to a kind of dance in which there is a constant movement back and forth in order for someone to gain control and take the lead in the dance. The characters are not actually dancing but they are in some sort of fight where the boy tries to hold on to his father while the father walks around and it is as if they are “waltzing”. The second stanza of this poem describes the events that happen in a way that allows the reader to understand better. “We went wild until the pans / slipped off the kitchen shelf;” (lines 5-6) creates a vivid image of a father and his son stumbling into the kitchen while the father beats his son so hard that even the pots on the kitchen shelf fall off. These images help lead the reader to add their own details to the image, such as the blood and bruises that might form when the father hits his son and the sound of pots crashing to the ground. The imagery is further expanded when the author finally mentions the mother who appears to have been present inferring from “My mother's face / She could not lie down alone.” The reader is now able to imagine the mother standing on the sidelines, unhappy and helpless to do anything as she watches her husband beat her son. In this stanza, the speaker uses the end rhyme with the words "shelf" and "itself" to once again place more emphasis on the story. The third verse opens with a more detailed look at the specifics of exactly what the drunken father was doing. to his son. “The hand that held my wrist / was struck on the knuckle;” (lines 9-10) indicates that while one of the father's hands held the boy down, the other beat him until his knuckles began to hurt. The final rhyme included in this stanza was between the words "knuckle" and "buckle" to highlight the actions that took place when the speaker was being rapped by his father's knuckles and kept being dragged against his father's belt buckle as clung to him. mind: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay As mentioned in the last verse, “So you waltzed me to bed / I'm still holding on to your shirt”