Thanks to Robert for this poem, which is somehow both creepy and beautiful at once.

I was interested in tmorin's comment about the lulling quality of the poem making the ending bearable for a young listener. Maybe that's exactly what incantation does for us, the spell of the driving, forward-moving song allowing us to look at something dreadful while protecting us from it at the same time.

Is Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz: a contemporary(ish) version of this? In that poem, a father's drunken roughhousing is sung by a boy now old enough to know his father was dangerous and untrustworthy. But the poem employs the tight rhymes and repetitions of the villanelle, which somehow allows the poem to be both scary and enchanting at the same time.

I can tell by your fine post, Mark, that you are the poet Mark Doty. (I heard you at the Dodge Poetry Festival some years ago.) Welcome to Slate's PoemsFray.

Mary Ann

Hastily, from on the road, here in response to Mark (and Mary Ann) is Raleigh's poem, responding to Harvey Blume's post and the chess poem:

ON THE CARDS AND DICE

Before the sixth day of the next new year,
Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear:
Four kings shall be assembled in this isle,
Where they shall keep great tumult for awhile.
Many men then shall have an end of crosses,
And many likewise shall sustain great losses;
Many that now full joyful are and glad,
Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad;
Full many a Christian's heart shall quake for fear,
The dreadful sound of trump when he shall hear.
Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,
In every city and in every town.
By day or night this tumult shall not cease,
Until an herald shall proclaim a peace;
An herald strong, the like was never born,
Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn.

Wow, we are honored. Thanks for being here & posting this helpful note about this week's poem.

Contempo

Coincidence indeed: I happen to be in Saginaw, Michigan, and was touring Theodore Roethke's childhood home at about the same time as when Mark Doty was making his post suggesting, I think rightly, that Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" recalls--and conceivably was inspired by--this week's "Double Deed" poem.

Roethke wrote somewhat Gothic poems for children, in the Walter de la Mare tradition; some of his rhymes and his way with short lines resemble this poem, too.

Mark, a teacher here was suggesting that "My Papa's Waltz" is more affectionate and nostalgic, less miserable, than it seems to some readers. The context was, some of his students were convinced that Roethke was writing about child abuse. "My mother's countenance/ Could not unfrown itself" can to one reader suggest family comedy, to another, something deeply wrong.

Roethke aside, I'm engaged by how the elements of dread and fascination, energy and mortality, animate "Double Deed" in a way that uses reason to unravel itself. As with "Rock-a-bye Baby" and "Bobby Shaftoe," the possibility of political allegory enriches, but does not dispel, the quality of spell or charm.

Robert, that's weirdly coincidental. The world's bound together by luminous threads, sure enough.

Here's the Roethke poem in question:

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

While it's true that contemporary readers can hardly help but read Roethke's lyric through the lens of our moment's familiar narratives of addiction and the dysfunctional, I still think this poem's a long ways from a warm evocation of family fun. Look at the word choice: dizzy, death, unfrown, battered, scraped, hard. There's real tenderness in it, especially in those last two lines, but they don't erase "I hung on like death." And of course that's the great power of the poem, that Roethke has it both ways at once, which really does capture something of what many people feel toward their parents, that mix of devotion and fear. That polarity's the fuel that makes the poem go, and that's certainly true of the exhilaratingly creepy poem you posted, too.

PS and now I notice that I'd mis-remembered "My Papa's Waltz" as a villanelle. In memory I'd make it even more of a swirling dance than it is!

Yes, he has it both ways, sinister and innocent, frightened and loving-- doubleness again.

Mark, I think maybe your poetry-subconscious was melding "My Papa's Waltz" with "The Waking," ("I wak to sleep and take my waking slow . . . I learn by going where I have to go") another indelible Roethke poem, and a villanelle.

Seems Roethke isn't nearly as anthologized as Frost, Stevens, WCW, Lowell, Bishop, et al. Where do you think he ranks amongst 20th century poets? That is to say, how high on the totem pole should his head be carved in?

I see Roethke as the patch of flowering nettles at the foot of that totem pole.

Tomas Morin

Mark Doty, thank you for finding & taking the time to post the full text of the Roethke poem. Very helpful as is your commentary. I feel as if I am back in graduate school! (where I studied with Bill Matthews, whom I'm sure you knew.)

"My mother's countenance

could not unfrown itself."

Tragic, memorable and indeed, as we now say, "dysfunctional." Thanks to both for these contributions and I see now that Sherrod Santos has shown up to discuss the Tuesday "Anonymous" poem. Glory days for the Poems Fray, for sure.

Contempo (a poster here since Summer of 2000, off and on)

Robert is right, I made a new poem in the blurry depths of my memory out of "The Waking" and "My Papa's Waltz," and now that I think about it this seems to me something of a worthy project! At least to daydream about.

And Cutter is right, too, in noting that Roethke's reputation hasn't fared as well as some; I'm not sure just what his readership is among younger poets just now, whereas you can be sure that references to any number of other poets active in the Fifties will be recognized. I wonder if it's that our era values the self-examination of Bishop and Lowell over what I'd call Roethkean enactment. "The Waking," for instance, like many of Roethke's best poems, is a dance, and it give us the feel of a body swaying in trance, enchanted by its own vision, giving voice to a state of mind that resists the analytical light of the intellect. Do we feel better about experience considered and mediated in poetry than we do about the kind of weird psychic drama of Roethke's slippery roots and strange little songs about rats and the underlife?

Certainly the poem that Robert has chosen this week is one that has far more kinship to Roethke, Berryman and Plath than to the work that Bishop, Lowell or Kunitz were doing at about the same time.

I wonder if it's that our era values the self-examination of Bishop and Lowell over what I'd call Roethkean enactment.

Rather, Mark, I think it's what you mention later --

Do we feel better about experience considered and mediated in poetry than we do about the kind of weird psychic drama of Roethke's slippery roots and strange little songs about rats and the underlife?

I don't know if we readers feel better, but we do feel more comfortable with, say, Kunitz.

And yet I've always felt a strong connection between "My Papa's Waltz" and Kunitz's "The Portrait," maybe because they both deal with the complexities parental relationships.

That's true, Eric, and Stanley and Roethke were close friends and poetic comrades, too. It's interesting to feel how different the position of the speakers is in these two poems. "The Portrait," despite that stinging slap at the end, is relatively calm in its method of narration, reporting an experience that reverberates throughout the speaker's life. The Roethke poem has that galumphing, insistent rhythm that seems to put us inside the small boy's body, less in control than Kunitz is.

I'm always curious how much this is a formal choice (the poet selecting a technique that's appropriate to the material at hand) and how much it's a function of character, an expression of a way of seeing the world.