Page 31 - Magazine

With a palm baked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Consonance, when final consonants match, occurs in such words

as breath/death, knuckle and buckle, shirt and dirt and shelf/itself.

Internal slant rhymes exist (romped/from/mother's/unfrown) and one use of
simile (like death). Enjambment occurs in every stanza.

Themes

There are several themes threading through each other.

 Parental issues - note the tension between the father and mother. The man

is hard working, wants a bit of fun with his son, yet when the domestic scene

becomes messy, the mother becomes disgruntled, perhaps a little angry.

 Alcohol - the father is obviously drunk and instils in his son a sense of fear.

The waltz somehow manages to contain the drunken man's energy but

there is the idea that things could get out of control.

 Security - the child in the poem 'hung on like death' making us think that the

father figure is all powerful. Later on the child is 'still clinging' to the father's

shirt as they go dancing off to bed.

Literature I – Magazine