I haven’t posted in a while. School resumed with a bang, and I’ve been swamped with a lot of work. This evening though, while doing my poetry homework, I came across this wonderful poem of William Carlos Williams, and I felt I had to share:
William Carlos Williams
“The Dance”
In Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess.
(scroll down to see the painting)
(And the art major and music geek inside of me smiled)
Here I’ve included the response I wrote for class:
I thoroughly enjoyed William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Dance”. As an art major, I immediately pictured the painting, Breughel’s The Kermess and the poem is such an incredible likeness of the “feel” of the painting.
As I read the poem aloud, I heard the waltzing music in the rhythm of the poem. The stresses on the syllables give the impression of a great swaying waltz: “the DANcers go ROUND, they go ROUND and/aROUND” (2-3). In music, the “waltz tempo” is ¾, or three quarter notes per bar (ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three). This poem follows the same meter as a traditional waltz. The repetition (and accentuation) of the word round emphasized this swaying music.
Although the poem itself doesn’t have a fixed rhyme scheme there is a repetition of sounds in the poem. An example of this is in lines nine and ten: “the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those/ shanks must be sound to bear up under such.” Although not a direct rhyme, butts and such has a distinct echo, and grounds and sound is a much closer rhyme, feeding the feel of the poem, the constant twirling and swaying of the words and the rhythm. This repetition of sound is also apparent in line 4: tweedle and fiddle. Again in line 11: “prance as they dance”.
The words “round” and “around” are mentioned in the second and third lines and the “ound” sound is repeated so often in the poem that the reader connects the entire poem as if it were one big sentence: a description of the even in a single breath. In line 2: round, round, in line 3, around, in line 5, round, in 6, impound, and in 10, sound. The poem is also sandwiched between the repetition of the line that states the title of the painting. Line 1: “In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess”, and line 10: “in Breughels great picture, The Kermess.” This repetition seems to turn the poem into an endlessly cycling repetition, much like the song from our childhood: “The Song That Doesn’t End.”
