At times, the speaker of the poem seems to be carried away by both the terror-inducing and the joyful act of the dancing, because of or despite the father"s carelessness about the mother"s kitchen and also his own and his son"s physical safety. "At every step you missed/ My right ear scraped a buckle." The tenderness of the mother and of the potential of dancing is disturbed by the harsh, scraping and intoxicated state of the father"s physical motion. Yet the father has also led a physically careless life himself, careless of his own physicality. This carelessness underlined from the whisky on his breath at the poem"s outset and also the fact that "the hand that held my wrist/ Was battered on one knuckle." .

             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.

             What is so interesting about Roethke"s selection of dancing as a metaphor to explain his father is that dancing is a traditionally feminine art in many cultures. Dancing is used to socially exclude the mother, and the fact that usually men and women dance together in a gentle fashion, rather than men and boys as father and son, makes the woman even more peripheral to the events that transpire in her home. The boy"s papa teaches him this traditionally feminine social device in the traditional female sphere of the kitchen and home, as a kind of insult to injury. .

             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.