"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath                              1
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans                                  5
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist                               9
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scared a buckle.

You beat time on my head                                13
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

       I chose this poem after reading all of the poems, because it was the one that stuck out to me the most. I liked the way that it sounded when I read it. This is because of the rhyme being used at the ends of each line. For example,  lines one and three have rhyme, two and four rhyme, six and eight rhyme, ten and twelve rhyme, thirteen and fifteen rhyme, and fourteen and sixteen rhyme. This made it a more fun read, and made it more flawy. Other than the rhyming, there seemed to be a pattern with the first word in each stanza. The first and third stanza both start with the word "the." The second and fourth start with the words "we" and "you." I made a connection with these since we is you plural. I found significance with it being we then you, because in the first two stanza's it is mainly talking about the boy with someone else, but then in stanzas three and four it mentions that the mom is with him and mainly talks about what's going on with her.
       The sounds weren't the only thing that popped out to me. There was also some imagery that went along with it. "Whiskey on your breath" is an example because you can imagine that smell. Imagining a "small boy dizzy" is like a 4 year old after they just spun around in circles 10 times. Of course death would be imagery, and waltzing could be imagery since we could imagine people in a ballroom waltzing. "Pans slid from the kitchen shelf" is imagery since I have even seen pans sliding from the kitchen shelf. "Hand that held my wrist" and "battered on one knuckle" would go together since you could imagine an adult hand around a child's wrist, and the adult's knuckle being beat up. When Theodore wrote that "at every step you missed my right ear scraped a buckle," I imagined a drunken mother cradling her little boy or girl up the stairs, and when missing a step they would go sideways hitting the little boy/girl's ear. "Waltzed me off to bed still clinging to your shirt" would be imagined as a women waltzing while holding their baby bringing them to bed. Overall I found Imagery, rhyme, and patterns with the first words.