We had the PSAT today, so many students were out during class. No matter — it’s recorded and posted on Google Classroom.
We began the day with a short open-note quiz on the two poems we just finished and on poetry in general. We followed that with a short viewing (about a minute) of the Stanford Viennese Ball’s opening waltz:
This was in order to provide students with some perspective about what a waltz looks like when we read “My Papa’s Waltz.”
Our reading of “My Papa’s Waltz” was a cautionary tale. At first it seems like so many words have connotations of abuse that the poem is actually about an abusive father.
- The “whiskey on your breath” line makes us think he’s inebriated.
- “Death” has obvious bad connotations.
- “Battered” and “beat” are abusive words.
The problem, though, is this is not a close-enough reading.
- Notice: his knuckle is what’s battered. Along with the “palm caked hard with dirt,” this suggests he’s a man used to hard manual labor.
- He’s beating time and nothing else — he’s tapping the boy’s head 1-2-3 to help him keep up with the waltz.
- The text shows he’s had something to drink; it doesn’t say he’s inebriated. (“Remember what that waltz looked like?” I reminded the students. “Do you think he could do that if he’d been inebriated?”)
- Note who puts him to bed: the father.
So this was a cautionary tale about reading too much into the connotations of a poem. Don’t overdo it. If there’s no evidence in the text, it’s likely not a valid interpretation.
