The poem begins with the speaker describing a memory from his childhood. The speaker's father comes home drunk, and the smell of whiskey on his breath is so strong that it makes the speaker, still a young boy, “dizzy.” Father and son waltz around their kitchen (a waltz is a kind of ballroom dance), which is difficult for the boy because his drunken dad is wobbly and unsteady. Even so, the boy clings on tightly—maybe out of fear, maybe out of love, likely out of a combination of both.
There’s something playful and spontaneous about this dance, which is likely a scene familiar to many readers; think of how little kids may stand on their father's feet as the two swirl around. On the surface, at least, it's a touching memory that suggests a close relationship between father and son. However, the speaker makes a couple of hints in these opening lines that his relationship with his father isn't as happy as it might seem. For example, the speaker hangs on “like death.” The simile is a little disturbing. Literally, the speaker is just describing how tightly he hangs on to his father. But the simile also suggests that dancing with his father is like death: that, when he does so, the speaker is in danger. This danger could be physical: the father might hurt the speaker (accidentally, out of drunkenness, or otherwise).
The end-stop at the end of line 3 emphasizes these ambiguities. It breaks a pattern of enjambments and end-stops that the poem follows elsewhere. Generally, the poem alternates enjambed and end-stopped lines: line 1, for example, is enjambed ("... breath / Could ...") and line 2 end-stopped ("... dizzy;"). The poem breaks that pattern just once, in line 3, which ends with a colon:
But I hung on like death:
The out-of-place end-stop makes the reader pause over the word "death" and consider its darker implications.
The poem's form also suggests that something's not quite right. Note, for instance, the stanza's uneven meter. The poem generally alternates between lines like line 1, which is in iambic trimeter, and lines like line 2, which is also in iambic trimeter, but ends with an extra unstressed syllable. (This is called a catalectic foot). Remember that an iamb is a poetic foot with an unstressed-stressed, or da DUM, pattern of beats; trimeter just means there are three of these iambs per line. Take lines 1-2:
The whis- | key on | your breath
Could make | a small | boy dizzy;
Iambic trimeter is a close approximation of the rhythm of a waltz: a waltz has three beats per measure and a line of iambic trimeter has three stresses per line. So the first line of the poem feels like a waltz—and then the second line breaks the rhythm, adding a little hiccup at the end. In a way, the second line mimics the father’s drunken dancing—the way he tries to keep the beat but keeps missing steps. Similarly, the slant rhyme in lines 2 and 4, between “dizzy” and “easy,” again suggest that something is off, that something doesn’t quite line up or connect between father and son.
As such, the poem’s form is full of hints of unease and violence. The “waltz” that the father and son share is thus not just a literal event: it is also an extended metaphor for their relationship. Like their relationship itself, this dance is complicated and unsteady, mixing together love, playfulness, and tension.