My Papa's Waltz

The poem My Papa's Waltz is about the relationship between an abusive father and his child, who is the narrator and the point of perspective. The little boy is trying to hold onto his father literally in the poem, but the poem is likely written from the perspective of an older person, looking back at his childhood. He is trying to hold onto the love for his father, despite his father being an abusive alcoholic.

The waltz in the poem is of course not relating to a dance. The waltz is the metaphor for the father's movements when he's been drinking, movements that are described in terms like "every step you missed my right ear scraped a buckle" and "you beat time on my head." The title adds meaning to the poem because a dance is like a routine, movements that are repeated, and the narrator is describing the routine nature of the beatings.

The poem has a lot of meaning beyond the literal meaning. The imagery is that of a young family that was struggling with this violence – mentioning the pans and the mother brings up a cliché of a woman grabbing a weapon to defend herself against the drunk man beating her. Words like beat, knuckles and buckle all directly conjur up the images of abuse, but are used in more of an indirect context here. But they are symbols of abuse, which combined with the metaphor of the dance, convey the narrator's pain.

The thematic message is the struggled that the boy has to still live his father, even when the father's actions make doing so difficult ("waltzed me off to bed still clinging to your shirt").. I believe the poem is being told in retrospect. The narrator describes the waltz not just as metaphor but how he tried to rationalize the events at the time, but today looks back and paints a clear picture of abuse. The narrator is trying to reconcile these memories with the idea of loving his father, perhaps trying to come to terms with his childhood, and whatever relationship he might still have with his father, if any.