Duality in interpretation is established immediately with the description “The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy.” This picture elicits a widely varied image of a man based on personal feelings and experiences. A reader who has experienced an alcoholic father develops an image of a drunken man towering over his child, while a reader without that experience draws an image of a man who, after a drink or two, is playing with his son.

Roethke, Theodore, “My Papa’s Waltz” Literature An Introduction To Reading And Writing, 2001, Page 831

The last two stanzas continue with the duality in meaning. They do not describe any part of the evening in sufficient detail to coerce the reader into a specific image of the father as a man relaxing after a hard days work with a drink and some fun with his son, or a drunk, abusing his child at the disapproval of the mother. The two sentences, “My right ear scraped a buckle, every time you missed a step” and “You beat time on my head with a palm caked hard by dirt,” allow the reader to infuse their own meaning into the words. Do these descriptions mean that the father was beating the child on the head or do they mean that the father simply tapped rhythm on the boy’s head? To the reader drawing either conclusion, their interpretation seems perfectly plausible, but, to the same reader, the opposite interpretation seems out of the question.

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