"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke is a simple four-lined poem of four stanzas. It is a recollection of the narrator's childhood memory of when he was 'waltzing' with his tipsy father in the house.
The whole short poem simply narrates the childhood experience of the narrator as a child being danced with by his father. Despite the drunken state of his father, the boy remembered how he loved him. The poem moves quite smoothly, with the use of simple language to describe the dancing. The rhythm f the poem is a simple regular rhyme, the common ABAB, though not complete end rhymes. And the rhythm also seems to resonate with the dance of the boy and his father, with the use of iambic trimeter (three stressed and unstressed syllables in each line.
