Determining the Intended "Tone"

An entry in a glossary runs: "Tone: the emotional atmosphere given to a work by authorial attitude; the field of feeling projected by devices of the poetic voice."

Dealing with tone can get us into (and back out of!) controversies about a poem's meaning. Let's consider the pervasive inter-human implications of Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz." I've chosen to examine this particular poem because controversy about how to define it tonally has grown up in recent years in the classroom. Readers have taken the piece to be "about" violence against a child, instancing as telling expressions of authorial intent along such lines the Papa's whiskey breath, the boy's consequent dizziness, the difficulty of his hanging on "like death" while swirled around by a drunken man, the overall lack of ease in this waltzing.

Following this line of response, we'd call the tone of the first stanza brutal, even use the word chosen by those who read it this way: abusive.

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

Further stanzas could then be seen as giving more evidence of abuse: the violence of the movement causing pans to fall, the disapproval of the mother.

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

And then comes the key moment supporting this understanding of Roethke's achieved tone: the Popa, battered himself (on the knuckle), passes the pain on to his child by letting his ear scrape against his belt-buckle

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

By now we're alert to the fact that the timing of the dance was something beaten on the child's head with a dirty hand, and again that the abused child must pathetically cling to the abuser's shirt in order not to fall and suffer more injury.

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

So the apprehension of a dire tone is supported by such a detailed reading.

But what has happened to the sense other readers take from the piece that it is wonderfully affectionate, a memory celebration of an exuberant contact with a father? Must we contradict the first reading altogether if we veer toward this second sense of how the material comes across to us emotionally overall?

We try to prevent different interpretations from turning critical response into a blood sport with winners and losers. Surely there  is a sense of danger in the poem; the mother, in the brilliant phrase about her frown, disapproves of the roughhousing as inappropriate, not the way she'd swirl a child off to bed! Something very masculine is going on here, something testosteronic, to coin a word. The "My" of the title associates the poet himself with the memory; we tend to read the speaker as a grown-up recalling himself as a little boy.

How does the tone of the poem seen as essentially celebratory come across? Well, after the first stanza's concession that it was far from easy to "waltz" with this particular father, consider the very word "waltz" – the two are dancing!

And in the next stanza the action is a "romp," with apparent solidarity between the two males who are disturbing the pans of the mother's kitchen.

The boy gets scraped when the somewhat tipsy Popa misses a step, we can incorporate that clear recognition of the sport not being "easy" from the abuse reading of the tone, but we could take the dirt-caked hand as an index of how much of a hard-worker this energetic father must have been. The sweep of being "waltzed" to bed clinging to a parent's shirt (the boy's that small !) is carried by the lilt of the verb  (try reading "waltzed" aloud    without  a rising inflection: it can't be done).

Finally the music of the waltz beat allows the poem to enact dance energy. Is the boy laughing (a bit hysterically, perhaps)? Is this a loving remembrance sung by a boy no longer a boy, in appreciation? It's your call as to how you feel, how you  argue for the tone of a poem. But I'd say "abuse" must largely yield here to appreciation, perhaps darkening that apprereciation as a sub-tone.

The word "tone" is very close to "mood," a pervasive area of  projected feeling. One might say that tone represents an "instrumentality" for the creation of mood, and that the music of the mood of great poems (I certainly call this one great) tends to be multi-toned.