Response to "My Papa's Waltz"

    After reading the poem, "My Papa's Waltz", my group and I debated on the meaning of the poem, and about what the author was trying to say by writing it.
    On one end of the argument, was Peter and Anna. They thought that the poem was about how the writer was being beaten, and the waltz was a symbol for abuse rather then a actual moment. The evidence they used to back up their story was the line in the poem "The whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy". Another line they used to back up the poem was "At every step you missed/ My right ear scraped a buckle". They inferred that these lines meant that the father was drunk and the boy was being abused as they did the waltz.
   When I first read the poem, I thought of it differently. I thought that Peter and Anna were reading into the poem too much, and maybe it really was just about a simple moment that this boy shared with his father. I tried to show that just because he had whiskey on his breath did not mean he was drunk, and even if he was, it does not necessarily mean he was abusing his child. Also, if the young boy was small, then perhaps when the father slipped his ear bumped against the fathers buckle. Overall, the feeling I got from the poem was not a negative one, I simply thought it was a poem about a moment shared between a father and a son.
   However, wen I got home, I took a closer look at the poem and began to understand what Peter and Anna were saying. If you look at the poem, the words that the author chose to use were not ones that sounded particularly cheery. For example "You beat time on my hear/ With a palm caked hard by dirt" and "But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy". When reading the poem again, I realized that it did not sound like a poem about a fun and enjoyable dance, but more about something deeper. Like in the line "We romped until the pans/Slid from the kitchen shelf". I don't think the waltz would be referred to as a 'romp' or be so forceful that it made the pans slide from the shelves. And so, my opinion about the poem changed. However, unlike Anna and Peter, I don't think it was about a dance at all, I think that was more of a symbol. I think the poem may have been more about the relationship the boy had with his father, and the poem was a symbol for it.