Poetry Research Essay

Introduction

My Papa's Waltz," one of the most anthologized and recognizable of Theodore Roethke's poems, embodies the poet's emphases on introspection and the anxieties of childhood, which were later to influence confessional. The immense divergence in the poem "My Papa's Waltz" engages the ambivalent feelings the grown son has about memories of his father. The poem Those Winter Sundays is composed by Robert Hayden in which speaker describes physical and emotional experience along with temperature changes and concomitant sounds (Hatcher, p.131). In the poem 'Do not Go Gentle into that Good Night' by Dylan Thomas the poet clarifies that the poem was an invocation to his dying father. This antithetical expression portrays the tense state of mind of the poet. All three poets have taken an entirely new view on the relationship of fathers and sons and even after that there has been some parallelism in all their respective composed pieces of poetry.

Thesis Statement

In all these three poems, the fundamental theme revolves around the relationship between fathers and sons and the complexities involved in this relationship. Discussion

The title "My Pap's Waltz" (The Poetry of Theodore Roethke,www.jstor.org vol.21) has various meaning, just by reading this poem people automatically think it's a father daughter's dance since a waltz is a slow dance and is usually danced by a father and daughter. Waltzing is usually known for the closeness that each other have to dance with. As people read the poem and see that's it's actually a son and father dance it gets a little unusual. “At every step you missed, my right ear scraped a buckle" (Line 9 and 12) from describing and symbolizing this line, the first thing that can be characterized is that the father is too drunk and is holding his son's hand too tight that is scraping his son's ear you beat time on my head, with a palmed caked hard by dirt. When waltzing when someone you're already dancing close enough, at this rate the young boy is too small that he only reaches his father's waist by his belt buckle. With that being said, his father was holding his face tightly on to his belt buckle that it was scraping his face. However, his father was being too aggressive that he was sexually abusing the child and was beating his head to get sexual pleasure. 

Although when Roethke was growing up and his father was still alive there was dance that people would dance and since the boys and girls were too short the father would lead them to the dance and due to the father drinking he didn't want his son to fall. Following this further, Blakian Peter who's from Louisiana believes that this young child feels a closeness with his father and he finds this poem comedic (www.jstor.org- For Fields. Baton Rouge page 354). On the other hand Bobby Fong President at Butler University agrees and disagree he thinks it has it's positive and negative points of view. The original poem was rescripted and combined the positive and negatives to ...