Urgency makes a communication compelling and our attention compulsory. Whatever the technique, whether shriek or sonnet, we sense the speaker’s need to be heard. These souls are shouting, “Fire! Help! Murder! Police!”

Urgency cannot be faked. It heaves from our core, hot as vomit. I must be heard, must, or else – I don’t know what!

Lyric poetry is a response to pain. A lyric poem has nothing to tell us, no point to make: prose is for making points. A lyric poem is an exclamation, a yikes, ouch, wow, hurrah. The singer needs to share an emotion which feels essential, educative. The most potent poems bleed and plead. The poet has written not because they want to but because they had to. So listen up!

“My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) is such a poem.

Its form is deceptively simple, four rhymed stanzas of four lines each, as reliable as a lullaby. Lullabies relax because they’re reliable: the world they reflect is comfortably under control. “Ring around the rosie” comforts, though it describes death by plague.

“My Papa’s Waltz” sounds homey, no? Dancing with Daddy – what could be pleasanter! Only Daddy is drunk, not yet falling-down drunk, but teetering in that dreadful direction.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.

(The same sing-song meter, note, as “Ring around the rosie” – and similar easy rhymes.)

That modifier, “like death,” while casually colloquial, spooks when freeze-framed in a verse. Cliches often shy from their origins (“Like hell you will!” “Damn right!”).

The drunken dance, already difficult and dizzying, gets dicier:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWe romped until the pansSlid from the kitchen shelf;My mother’s countenanceCould not unfrown itself.

No frolic this but a demonic bacchanal, fearsome to mom, who can’t bring herself to smile – or intervene.

For Papa is a violent angry man:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe hand that held my wristWas battered on one knuckle;At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.

The boy – from his belt-high stature we sense he’s twelve or so – is being treated roughly – wrist gripped, ear scraped . Call Child Protective Services! Only that’s an agency that always arrives too late. This kid’s already black and blue.

So is the boy resentful, panicked, frantic? Here is the poem’s shock, why the boy, now grown – and a poet – urgently needed to share this memory.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedYou beat time on my headWith a palm caked hard by dirt,Then waltzed me off to bedStill clinging to your shirt.

Beat time? Sounds like child abuse. But wait. Beat time is what music-makers do, what the poet is doing. And beating time is what we all want to do, that is, never die.

Instead of hating his rough dad, the boy loves him – “to death,” one might say. The pity that pulses from that one line! – “With a palm caked hard by dirt.” Papa has cause to be angry, drunk. Yet how he loves his boy, whom he “waltzes off to bed” – sweet dreams! And how the son clings – then and now – for no one, we sense, has loved him so fiercely, so irrevocably, ever, ever, ever.

Roethke, like Papa in this poem, was an alcoholic and depressive, who loved fiercely and died young (age 55). Some of America’s foremost poets cling to his memory and words. Said James Dickey (no slouch himself): “I don’t see anyone else that has the kind of deep gut vitality that Roethke’s got. Whitman was a great poet but he’s no competition for Roethke.”

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedMy Papa’s Waltz

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

We romped until the pansSlid from the kitchen shelf;My mother’s countenanceCould not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wristWas battered on one knuckle;At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my headWith a palm caked hard by dirt,Then waltzed me off to bedStill clinging to your shirt.