A Comparative Paper on the Poems of Theodore Roethke

A detailed Summary of A Comparative Paper on the Poems of Theodore Roethke

In the American poet Theodore Roethke's poems "My Papa's Waltz," "Cuttings (Later)," and "Cuttings," ordinary aspects of the domestic environment, like a young child being taught to dance by his father or the routine pruning and cutting of plants, during springtime become life-lessons that I believe are not simply common to Roethke's earliest formative childhood experiences, but to all people. The physical objects and actions of the poems take on great symbolic significance, when funneled through the words of the poetic voice of Roethke. Dancing and pruning become rites of passage and religious actions, rather than everyday occurrences. Through such poetic images, Roethke underlines the fact that all experiences, from dancing to gardening can be both frightening and exhilarating, terrifying and religious, and joyous and important in the life of the poetic speaker.

In "My Papa's Waltz," the normally cheerful act of dancing, especially in a kitchen scene and environment, becomes violent, when seen through the eyes of the young child. Rather than being 'high on life,' the boy's father is intoxicated with another substance: "The whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy," begins the poem, as the boy learns to dance. He

Now the poet can take pride that he has had a hand, almost like Jesus breaking the bread and parcelling out fish, in creating new life and food from apparently nothing, except with the aid and communing with nature, through the act of planting. Although this saint of the common greenery admits that "I quail," as I "lean to beginnings, sheath-wet," as if he is afraid of the power such planting provokes in the soil, after the act of cutting and pruning. The fear of adulthood, rather than the carelessness of childhood has taken hold.

Thus unlike the dance between father and son, the act of pruning becomes a unselfish as well as sympathetic bond, between the poet and nature rather than a contrasting bond between the poet and his father against the mother in the kitchen. In "Cuttings (Later) as "The small waters seeping upward,/The tight grains parting at last,' the garden becomes a place of new life, a traditionally feminine place like the kitchen of the waltz now filled with the gardener's masculine, life-giving energy, but in such a way that new life and sustinance is created "when sprouts break out,/Slippery as fish."

Thus the poem suggests perhaps the father expects his son to be similarly careless about what happens to the boy's own masculine hands, what delirious dancing does to women's "unfrowning countenances," what whisky has down to his own body, and done to the kitchens and lives of others, especially women who are excluded from masculine and joyous dancing.

hangs on "like death" to his father, because, as the first stanza counsels, "such waltzing is not easy," when his father is in such a simultaneously drunken and delighted state.

The woman watching is not asked or allowed to participate, and the father goes about his teaching in a fashion that actively displeases the boy's mother: "My mother's countenance/Could not unfrown itself," and the father's actions to some extent seems to nastily exclude her from the "romping" of the son and the father across the kitchen floor. At the end of the poem, the boy is put to bed by his father's care, not his mother's tender arms. "Then [my father] waltzed me off to bed/ Still clinging to your [his father's] shirt." The boy does not care that his father: "beat time on my head/ With a palm caked hard by dirt." The dirtiness of his father from work, and the harshness of the father's rhythm are endured as fair prices to pay for the father's affection and at

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Approximate Word count = 1636
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English