I chose to read “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke for my poem. Sometimes, the title of a piece of writing can have some hidden meaning, but in this poem, the title plainly states what this poem is about. It was easy to discover the rhyme scheme. Each word at the end of every line rhymes in pairs. I recognized it the first time I read the poem, but that made it harder for me to find other characteristics. I had to re-read the poem multiple times, aloud and in my head, to finally notice other elements hidden in the writing.
After looking at the poem closely, I found that there are multiple words ending in “ed” such as “romped”, “battered”, “missed”, “scraped”, and “waltzed”, making the poem written in past tense. By counting the amount of syllables in each line, I found that the first and third stanzas contain the same pattern of syllables in a line, but they are opposite. In the first stanza, the pattern of syllables is 7,6,7,6, and in the third stanza it is 6,7,6,7. By doing this, I also found that every line in the poem begin with a one syllable word. The poem contains one simile “But I hung on like death”, but it is filled with descriptive phases that I can relate to, which makes it really easy for me to paint a picture of the events in my head.
Caroline, you are looking very closely at the poem, particularly in counting syllables. And that's a good thing, but try to connect to the big picture of what the poem is about and what it accomplishes through tense or rhyming or syllable patterns. When you say you could paint a picture in your head, what images contributed most to that?
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