GATE 2021 XH2 – Question 65
Read Theodore Roethke’s My Papa’s Waltz.
The whiskey on your breath / Could make a small boy dizzy; / But I hung on like death: / Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans / Slid from the kitchen shelf; / My mother’s countenance / Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist / Was battered on one knuckle; / At every step you missed / My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head / With a palm caked hard by dirt, / Then waltzed me off to bed / Still clinging to your shirt.
Which observations are supported?
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Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: (B) The first stanza contains a simile.; (C) Images in the last two stanzas suggest a working-class father.
Explanation
“Like death” is an explicit simile, giving B. The battered knuckle and dirt-caked palm suggest manual labour, supporting C as an inference. The poem has sixteen lines in four quatrains, not a fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet, and its alternating rhymes are not consecutive rhyming couplets. Select B,C; these formal observations do not require resolving the poem’s broader emotional ambiguity.