To the child "such waltzing was not easy." The phrase, too, "you beat time on my head" tells us something of the child's height, as well as the father's strength. The description about the hand is an evocative phrase. And 'sliding' is again consistent with the dance movements of a waltz. The waltz is a form of rough horsing, and Roetke shows both in his poem, with tension jostling fun.

The rhythmic romp of the waltz can be felt in the poem's iambic trimetrical quatrains..

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy." (lines 1-4)

But although the whisky is mentioned, the father does not come off as a drunk. The poem is a little field of energy with...

There is regularity and consistency and each stanza can actually be read with the same cadence as a moderately paced waltz.
The meter and rhythm define the mood of the poem. Perfect timekeeping would have had 6 syllables per line, but analysis of the poem shows us that four of the sixteen lines have seven syllables. And it is, therefore slightly off-meter and jerky as the waltz must have been itself: the steps of a somewhat shaky, drunk man ((Underwood, 8).

The rhyming is also imperfect. The first and third lines, as well the third and fourth lines, rhyme imperfectly with each other. "Dizzy' and "easy" and "pans" and "countenance" could have been the rhyming of a small child (as