The three poems I will be looking at in this essay are ''My Papa's Waltz'' ''Our Father'' and ''The Early Purges''.

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Obviously our childhood is the most important period of our lives, it determines how we develop and can have a great influence on we will be like when we grow up. Much of our formation depends on our parents and how strict they are etc.

I have had a reasonably good childhood. I have had two parents who have jobs, which means two sets of wages are coming into the house every week. That has enabled us to have a comfortable lifestyle.

The three poems I will be looking at in this essay are ‘’My Papa’s Waltz’’ ‘’Our Father’’ and ‘’The Early Purges’’. In this essay I will be looking at childhood and how childhood experiences are recalled by the different poets and reflected in the way they write their poems. These poems are disturbing in the way that they all include cruelty.

The first poem that I will look into is ‘’My Papa’s Waltz’’. In this poem a boy seems to be getting hurt by his father we know this because it says

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

 

but this only seems to happen when the father is drunk because the poem  opens up with the observation that 

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‘’the whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy’’

 The father might possibly be a very violent man we see this when it says which tell us that the dad likes a fight or two the poet recalls how

‘’the hand which held my wrist was battered on one knuckle’’ and

‘’at every step you missed my right ear scraped a buckle’’.

 Theodore Roethke writes

‘’you beat time on my head with a palm caked hard by dirt, then waltzed me off to bed still clinging to your shirt’’. 

The word ‘’waltz’’ in ...

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