Both speakers in the two poems, "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke and "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath, have largely negative feelings toward their fathers. Both see the power in their fathers, both physical and psychological, and they are intimidated by that power. It can be argued that the boy in Roethke's poem loves his father---the words "romped" and "waltzed" and even "papa" might imply a sense of love and joy, for both the father and the dance. It can also be argued that the obviously mature writer of the poem, reflecting back on the "waltz" with his father, wants to subtly and ironically portray that event as something far more complex than simply a moment of fun between father and son. The feelings of the children for their fathers cannot be said to change in any significant way in the course of either of the poems. This is especially true for the boy in Roethke's poem, and slightly less so for the daughter in Plath's poem. Plath's speaker at least claims by poem's end to have cast off her father's oppressive influence.
Assessing Roethke's poem requires more active participation by the reader than does assessing Plath's. From the first lines of Plath's poem, there is no doubt the speaker hates and fears her father. She compares her relationship with him to a foot trapped in a shoe, "Barely daring to breathe or Achoo" (Plath 975). She compares him to a Nazi, and herself to a Jew in a concentration camp, and extends this diatribe, apparently, to her husband as well. The images of fear and hatred build and gather, although the poem includes a paradox: "Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you" (Plath 976). The speaker is confessing in that passage that there is something awe-inspiring, something horribly fascinating, about the fascist, the Nazi, the father who treats his daughter as a Nazi treated a Jew. However, the speaker's fear of and hatred for her father blurs all subtlet...