The Dance
The Dance - context Summary
Inspired by Brueghel's Painting
This short ekphrastic poem recreates Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Kermess through vivid, sensory lines. Williams focuses on the dancers’ round bodies, noisy instruments, and exuberant movement to evoke communal, earthy celebration. The language compresses visual detail into physical motion, turning painterly observation into sound and rhythm. It appears in Williams’s 1962 collection Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, part of a sequence inspired by Brueghel’s art.
Read Complete AnalysesIn Breughel'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 Breughel's great picture, The Kermess
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