In the beginning of the poem, the speaker says, “The whiskey on your breath / Could make a small boy dizzy” (Roethke 1-2). For the child to become dizzy just from the breath of his father, the father must be very drunk. Usually casual drinkers do not …show more content…
The stanza begins as the speaker says, “The hand that held my wrist / Was battered on one knuckle” (9-10). When I imagine a father and son playing together, the last thing I imagine is the father’s rough, battered hand firmly grasping the son’s small wrist. Usually, if my mother ever held my wrist that way when I was a child, it probably meant I was in trouble and she was trying to keep me from escaping her wrath. It makes much more sense for the father to be abusing son rather than playing with him in this stanza because of the tight grip he has on the son to keep him from running. After these lines the speaker states, “At every step you missed / My right ear scraped a buckle” (11-12). I can only picture this scenario as the father beating his son with a belt and whenever he missed wherever he intended the belt to land, the buckle of the belt would hit the son in the