My Papa’s Waltz
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
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The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death;
Such waltzing was not easy.
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We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
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The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
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You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
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Roethke’s father was an immigrant from Germany who “owned and ran a 25-acre greenhouse.” He died of cancer when Roethke was only 14 (Poetry Foundation biography).
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“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
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Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
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Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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Wild men, who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
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Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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Dylan Thomas was the son of David John Thomas, who — with a first-class honors degree in English from University College, Aberystwyth, Wales --- "had...ambitions to rise above his position teaching English literature at the local grammar school” in Swansea (Wikipedia). The senior Thomas lived into his 70’s, dying in 1952. The poet, at age 39, did not survive the following year.
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Ecce Puer
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Of the dark past
A child is born.
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.
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Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!
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Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.
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A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
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About this poem, Carol Rumens, writing three years ago in The Guardian: “Literally translated as Behold the Young Boy, Ecce Puer celebrates the birth of Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, in February 1932, and mourns the death of his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, the previous December. The plea for forgiveness at the end of the poem springs from Joyce's guilt over failing to return from the continent to Ireland when John Joyce lay dying.”
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NOTES:
No intention to slight daughters! Father-and-daughter poetry next year, perhaps.
Also, for anyone who missed it at the time, posted on Mother’s Day: CLASSIC POETRY: Mothers Say, With Sylvia Plath, Joanna Baillie, and Louise Gluck
Could not be borrowed due to copyright, but interesting: a father and son took an annual photo together, starting when the boy was an infant, and continuing into his adulthood. Their photo series can be viewed at www.dailymail.co.uk/...
More diaries on DKos:
Classic Poetry Group
FreeWriters
Readers and Book Lovers (with full schedule of literary diaries)
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These fragments I have shored against my ruins. -- T.S. Eliot