Michael Robartes And The Dancer - Analysis

A debate that keeps returning to the mirror

The poem’s central claim is that a certain kind of masculine love wants a woman to be legible, visible, and finally thoughtless—and it dresses that demand up as art criticism, theology, and common sense. From the start, the male voice dismisses debate itself: Opinion is not worth anything. Yet he immediately tells a story whose whole point is that thought will not stay dead. In the altar-piece, the knight’s “dragon” is explicitly the lady’s mind: the half-dead dragon was her thought, which every morning rose again and fought back. The lover imagines that if the “impossible” happened, she would look into the “glass” and on the instant become wise—wisdom reduced to self-recognition, as if the mirror could finish the argument for her.

The dancer’s brief interjections keep puncturing the romance of that story. You mean they argued is a plain, almost amused translation of his allegory. Her questions don’t accept his setup; they insist on practical freedom: May I not put myself to college? The poem becomes a contest over who gets to define what counts as knowledge, and what kind of woman love is allowed to want.

The “lover’s wage” and the economy of being looked at

One of the poem’s sharpest tensions is between affection and payment. He claims your lover’s wage is what the “looking-glass” can show. Love becomes a kind of salary earned by keeping the surface pleasing, and jealousy becomes inevitable: he will turn green with rage at anything “not pictured there.” That line quietly makes the mirror a prison. It isn’t merely vanity; it’s a rule about what is permitted to exist. Anything not visible—learning, argument, private thought—threatens the lover because it can’t be possessed as an image.

The dancer’s desire for college, then, isn’t just intellectual ambition; it’s a refusal to be paid in gaze. The poem doesn’t let us miss how small her space becomes: the “glass” has to be “full,” and even the “foot-sole” must be thought about only as “lineaments” that please. The language of measurement and fullness turns a person into an inventory.

Athene by the hair: mocking the very idea of women’s learning

When she asks about education, his response is both flamboyant and contemptuous: Go pluck Athene by the hair. Athena, goddess of wisdom, is invoked only to be manhandled—an image that makes women’s pursuit of knowledge seem absurd and violent at once. He then sets “mere book” learning against a knowledge supposedly granted by the body: that beating breast, that vigorous thigh, that dreaming eye. The phrasing performs what it argues: it breaks the woman into admired parts and calls that admiration knowledge.

There’s a deliberate contradiction here. He pretends to honor embodied “impassioned gravity,” yet his examples are not the woman’s experience of her body; they are the lover’s assessment of it. Even the “dreaming eye” is treated as an aesthetic feature, not a mind at work. The line may the Devil take the rest shows how quickly the argument turns punitive: anything outside the approved register of beauty is cast as disposable, even damnable.

Venice and the Sistine: art enlisted as evidence

The poem’s art references are not decorative; they are part of the pressure campaign. He cites Paul Veronese and his sacred company by the lagoon she loves, insisting they imagined bodies as ceremonious proof that everything must come to sight and touch. Art becomes a courtroom exhibit: the painterly tradition is used to argue that the visible body is the highest truth.

Then he pivots to Michaelangelo and the Sistine ceiling, especially Morning and Night, praising how tightened or loosened “sinew” can rule by supernatural right and yet be but sinew. This is a hinge in the poem’s thinking: the body is granted “supernatural” authority, but immediately reduced to mere muscle. The sacred is allowed only insofar as it can be turned back into anatomy. His argument wants it both ways: a woman’s body should carry spiritual power, but only the kind that keeps her within the realm of touchable spectacle.

The danger of the body—and the danger of denying it

The dancer introduces another inherited warning: There is great danger in the body. His reply is a theological riddle: when God gives wine and bread, does He give His thought or His mere body? The question matters because it exposes what his earlier stance tries to hide. If the sacred comes through “mere body,” then the body cannot be dismissed as shallow; but if it comes through “thought,” then his anti-intellectual pose collapses. The poem tightens around an uncomfortable truth: arguments about women’s bodies are never just about beauty—they are also about who gets to claim the sacred, and by what route.

Her response—My wretched dragon is perplexed—is almost heartbreaking in its understatement. The “dragon,” once framed as a nuisance to be slain, now sounds like her own mind trying to survive contradictory commandments: be pure body, but beware the body; be holy, but don’t think; be beautiful, but don’t learn like a man.

The Latin-text voice: “uncomposite blessedness” as a trap

Near the end, a third voice enters—marked as Hec.—and the poem shifts from teasing argument to doctrinal certainty: I have principles, It follows, Latin text. This is the most chilling moment because it turns taste into law. “Blest souls” are declared not composite, and from that abstract claim comes a program for women: all beautiful women may live in uncomposite blessedness if they will banish every thought except what pleases their view in the mirror. The mirror, again, is the engine: salvation is imagined as perfect self-objectification.

What’s being denied here is the basic composite nature of a person—body and mind in friction, desire and doubt in the same room. The poem’s irony is that the “dragon” is called wretched, yet it is the only force in the poem that keeps the dancer from being turned into a devotional image. Her last line, They say such different things at school, lands softly but cuts deep: education may be confusing, but at least it admits plurality. The men’s voices offer certainty at the cost of her inner life.

A sharper question the poem won’t let go

If the lover’s “wage” depends on the mirror, what happens to love when the woman refuses to be only what is pictured there? The poem keeps circling one suspicion: that the demand for a thoughtless beauty isn’t admiration at all, but fear—fear of the “dragon” that rises every morning, and fear that a woman might become wise in a way no lover can own.