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In My Papa's Waltz Rhetorical Devices

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What makes a memory so memorable? In My Papa's Waltz , by Theodore Roethke, he writes about a childhood memory, that seems bittersweet to the author. A memory that he appreciated remembering about his father and him in the middle of the night, waltzing around. The author uses connotation devices that hold deeper meaning to the poem and what waltzing really means to him. For instance in the poem the author says “The whiskey on your breath...but I hung on like death,such waltzing was not easy”. He’s using your senses to describe the smell to give you a better understanding of what's happening. The smell of whiskey shows his father had a little too much to drink but the smell didn’t seem to stop the boy. No matter the smell he hung on like death, using a simile to show the reader that the smell wasn’t an issue to him.He also used the simile to apply it to …show more content…

The waltz is a four step dance to every four beats similar to the poem. The poem is styled to have four stanzas with four verses in every stanza. Having a four to four ratio similar to the waltz so it seems that the author used the flow of the poem to symbolize the waltz. In the poem, it says “at every step you missed my right ear scraped a buckle”. One late night the boy and the father were waltzing around the kitchen, but with every missed step the boy paid the consequences with a little scrap. Due to the height difference it may be inferred that the boy had to stand on the toes of his father causing the scraping of the ear on the buckle. With him having to stand on his shoes the reader can also interpret that this was a past memory when he was younger. The author also named the poem My Papa's Waltz, He used papa which is what children refer to their dad as. If it was a recent memory he would call it my dad's waltz or something along those lines. Going back to the idea that it was a old memory of him and his

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