Unit 8aSection 4 aExercise 14aAbuse & NeglectaImpact: Life-long Effects

In Unit 5, we cited portions of an essay by Scott Russell Sanders in which he depicts growing up with an alcoholic father. In that essay, the deep disappointment and the life-long bereavement that erodes the father-son relationship is poignantly rendered. Ambivalence towards the parent shapes the inner conflicts of the adult. Sanders reflects in his essay on how his reaction to his father’s alcoholism defined the adult ‘workaholic’ he himself later became.

"My Papa’s Waltz", Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

Study Questions

1. Do you believe that this poem describes an abusive father-son relationship? What specific words and images indicate abuse? Identify the images that demonstrate the push-and-pull of this relationship: intimacy on the one hand, and cruelty on the other. How does the speaker’s “waltz” with his father represent a delicate balance of their relationship?

2. Why does the child hold onto his father “like death” and “cling to his shirt”? What do you know about the effect of a child’s experiences such as the one depicted on his future relationships?