A Drunken Mans Praise Of Sobriety - Analysis

A toast that keeps undoing itself

The poem’s central trick is that it praises sobriety in a voice that can’t stop confessing its own intoxication. The speaker begs a girl to keep me dancing still so he can stay a sober man even while he drink[s] my fill. That contradiction isn’t a slip; it’s the point. For him, sobriety isn’t simply not drinking. It’s a kind of wakefulness he tries to force into being through motion, music, and company. The poem reads like a spell cast by someone who knows the spell may fail.

Dance as emergency medicine

At first, the tone is rowdy and coaxing: Come swish around, he says, with a comic intimacy that makes the address feel like a barroom refrain. But quickly the speaker sounds less like a flirt and more like a man bargaining with his own collapse. Dancing becomes a practical strategy to avoid the fate of other drinkers: Though drunkards lie and snore. Sleep is pictured as a small death—horizontal, unconscious, surrendering—and the speaker refuses it by insisting on movement. When he calls sobriety a jewel, it’s not moral purity he’s admiring; it’s something hard, bright, and rare—something you can lose if you stop paying attention for even a minute.

From playful partner to sea-creature ideal

The speaker’s pet names also reveal what he wants from the dancer. He begins with pretty punk, a word that carries a rough, worldly edge—someone available, maybe disreputable, but lively. Later he corrects himself: A mermaid, not a punk. The shift feels like a sudden tightening of standards, as if he’s asking her to become less human and more mythic—pure motion, pure lure, a creature who belongs to rhythm the way waves belong to the sea. He’s not just seeking a companion; he’s demanding an antidote to gravity. The poem’s energy comes from how desperate that demand is, and how impossible: no person can dance for you forever, or keep you from yourself.

The turn: every dance floor is a graveyard

The poem darkens sharply when the speaker warns, O mind your feet, and then drops the line under every dancer / A dead man. What had been a scene of music becomes a vision of burial: the dance floor is literally layered over graves. This isn’t decorative gloom; it changes what sobriety means. Staying upright, staying in step, becomes a way of not falling into the earth that’s already waiting beneath the boards. The image makes the earlier “snoring drunkards” feel like bodies already practicing for the grave—alive but unavailable, surrendered to oblivion.

No ups and downs: the fear of falling out of life

The command No ups and downs sounds like advice about dancing, but it also sounds like a plea against instability—against the bodily sway of drunkenness and the emotional sway of despair. The poem’s key tension is that the speaker wants control without relinquishing excess. He wants to drink my fill and yet remain a sober man. So he relocates sobriety from the bottle to the body: if he can keep moving, he can pretend he is choosing, not drifting. But the graveyard image suggests how thin that choice is. The dance is less celebration than postponement.

A chilling equation: drunk, dead, and the same

The last lines snap the poem shut with a brutal logic: A drunkard is a dead man, and all dead men are drunk. The first claim is a familiar warning—drink makes you less alive, less present. The second is stranger and colder: death itself resembles drunkenness, a total unknowing, a permanent loss of balance and self-command. In that light, the speaker’s “praise of sobriety” isn’t a sermon at all; it’s panic dressed up as song. He keeps ordering the dance because he intuits that stillness—whether sleep, stupor, or death—erases the person who is speaking.

The poem’s dare

If all dead men are drunk, then the speaker’s fear isn’t really alcohol; it’s the condition of being human, already standing on top of graves. So what is he actually asking the dancer to do—keep him sober, or keep him from noticing what sobriety finally means: seeing the grave under the floor and dancing anyway?