What I should have said in class weeks ago when we discussed this

A few weeks ago we discussed "My Papa's Waltz"/"My Father's Dance”…a situation in which it seems that someone took "My Papa's Waltz," and tried to re-write it, line by line, in a degenerative way as a means to show what to strive for when writing poetry. The product was “His Father’s Dance;” a less natural sounding generic poem with lack of personality, and a hindering sense of neutrality.

In class, among the meaningful observations discussed and the resulting conclusions drawn, I had an idea which stemmed from one of the more obvious differences between the poems: point of view. Though this thought I had is not quite as relevant, some may consider it interesting to keep in mind when writing. (Poetry or anything)

So, aside from some of the more obvious reasons as to why first person as opposed to third person works better in this situation, something else that is important to think about is credibilty. Point of View does a lot when it comes to determining credibility. The reader subconsciously accepts whatever level of credibility is provided through perspective, but the writer must be aware of what the chosen point of view he or she selects does for the piece.

In “My Papa’s Waltz,” the first person combined with the nature of the poem and language used makes it feel fairly credible. The voice seems young and consequently innocence is communicated to the audience. This makes us assume things like, “this poem is about being abused.” Such a conclusion makes us feel a high level of credibility in this case.

But…

In some cases first person is extremely unreliable and not very credible at all. In contrast, one could argue that as we know first person does not provide a large scope of everything, but simply through only one set of eyes. That said, what if he was being bad earlier and deserved some sort of punishment. Or, yes the boy in “My Papa’s Waltz” is young; therefore, he can’t be trusted. His experiences are limited and so his innocence explains that this is simply a dance. He doesn’t know of abuse so he can’t know that his language sounds like it’s referring to abuse at times. Can we simply forget the old saying; there are two sides to every story.

Now don’t get me wrong, in this case the first conclusion is probably more of what Roethke was going for, but in other cases where first person is used who’s to say the voice is that of a highly credible one? When viewing a conflict within a piece of literature for first person, we must be careful to keep this in mind when analyzing. More importantly, we must keep this in mind when writing. What meaning do we want readers to uncover in our writing? And secondly, does the point of view combined with the other elements of writing chosen work together to portray the amount of credibility necessary for such discovery?

To me, it is a matter of what feels most natural for the impression I want my piece to give. Since it is best/ inevitable to write mostly of what we know (our experiences), I’d say first person is most common, a good starting place. It is using it to its maximum potentials keeping credibility in mind that is the challenge.

-Rachel Alberico