In "My Papa's Waltz," the narrator describes his relationship with his father. The speaker is waltzing with his intoxicated father. The poem shows the speaker's conflicting feelings. He is repulsed by the whiskey smell on his father's breath, but he "hung on like death." And even though this "waltzing was not easy," the image in the end is of the speaker clinging to his father's shirt. He loves his father but has a need to rebel from him.
Roethke uses the waltz as a metaphor for the relationship between father and son. In the first stanza, he might be suggesting that the father needs to be a little drunk in order to express his emotions. In the next two stanzas, the speaker illustrates how the waltz is forced and even violent. One could derive different interpretations from this. But, in general, this suggests that the father tries to show his son that a man is tough. In their relationship, the father demonstrates that toughness with his son, or even on his son.
Playing with this metaphor of the waltz, the father is traditional in the sense that he is the man of the family and he wants his son to follow in his footsteps. The father essentially "leads" his son the way a man would lead in a waltz. Sometimes, the son loves his father's guidance but sometimes he feels his father forces him.
Roethke was interested in poetry at an early age. His own father was the masculine type described in this poem. Here, Roethke reflects upon that conflicted relationship of an artistic son being molded by a more traditional, masculine father.
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