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 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.

             Although dancing should ideally be an act of social communion, between the boy and his father it also becomes an act of social exclusion. The boy"s mother frowns as the "pans/Slid from the kitchen shelf;" due to the violence of the pair"s dancing. The father and son form an alliance against the mother, than excludes and destroys her kitchen life and her femininity, through their dancing.

             I as a reader may feel sympathy for the mother, but the boy does not.