“The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.”

—from “My Papa’s Waltz,” by Theodroe Roethke

Theodore Roethke’s poem, “My Papa’s Waltz,” is in many high-school anthologies.

When I first read it, I saw only an optimistic interpretation, so I usually assigned it to classes in June, near Father’s Day.

In my interpretation, the 16 lines are about a loving father who brings some intoxicated energy home after a day of hard labor. He arrives late, after dinner has been served, the dishes washed, the kitchen tidied.

Oblivious or uncaring that he had stayed too long drinking with his friends, he lifts his son, carrying him around the kitchen in an awkward dance “until the pans slid/ from the kitchen shelf.”

Having seen my own father sometimes exasperate our mom, Roethke’s “my mother’s countenance/ could not unfrown itself,” brought back memories of when Pop’s fun annoyed her.

I hoped the 11th-grade students understood “My Papa’s Waltz” as a poem about the clumsiness of love, the many ways it can be expressed and the complications of a marriage. Maybe it would provide a context for their own family experience, balancing the unrealistic families that were on television that were always either wonderful or horrible.

After discussing the idea of the poem, we’d spend some time looking at its rhythm, an iambic pattern echoing the dance around the kitchen. Teaching poetry to high-school students — especially on a sunny June day — was like pushing big boulders up steep mountains. If you weren’t careful, their eyes got glassy, and even if you kept on teaching, they stopped learning.

But you hoped they enjoyed the poem, that it would increase their interest in poetry, that it would be another art form they’d appreciate — like sculpture or music. Some might even write poetry for themselves, for the same reasons people take photographs or paint landscapes, or even shoot pool — just for the fun of it.

That’s what happened in high-school classes, and a positive, maybe sentimental, view of the poem was where we left it.