The Dance - Analysis

Introduction

The poem offers a lively, visual evocation of Pieter Bruegel's painting The Kermess, recreating the scene's motion and noise with an exuberant, almost breathless tone. The mood is celebratory and physical at the start, focusing on movement and sound, with a slight undercurrent of comic observation that keeps the energy earthy rather than idealized. There is little tonal shift; the poem sustains its rollicking immediacy from opening to close.

Context and Authorial Frame

William Carlos Williams, an American modernist and physician, often sought to translate everyday sights into concise poetic moments. By invoking Bruegel, Williams aligns himself with a tradition of visual art as source material, compressing a painted tableau into a handful of sensory verbs and objects while privileging the immediate, local details over historical narration.

Main Themes

Communal festivity: The poem foregrounds collective motion—dancers “go round” and “around”—suggesting social bonding through shared, rhythmic activity. Physicality and the body: Repeated attention to hips, bellies, shanks, and butts emphasizes corporeal presence and the animal, earthy aspects of human joy. Art as translation: By repeatedly naming “Breughel's great picture,” the poem meditates on how a static image is made dynamic through language, as Williams animates brushstrokes into sound and motion.

Imagery and Symbolic Detail

Vivid, sensory images—“tweedle of bagpipes,” “tipping their bellies,” “thick-sided glasses”—anchor the poem in the tactile and aural. The recurring circle—dancers “go round, they go round and around”—functions as a symbol of cyclical communal life and ritual. The mention of “thick-sided glasses whose wash they impound” creates a sly parallel between drink and dance, suggesting excess and containment; it also raises an image of reflection, as if the revelry is both performed and observed. One might ask whether the poem admires the scene or wryly records human excess; its tone lets both readings coexist.

Language, Tone, and Form

Williams uses colloquial, compressed diction and enjambment to reproduce the painting's momentum: verbs pile up, short phrases accelerate the rhythm, and onomatopoeic words like “squeal” and “blare” supply audible texture. The poem’s loose, stanza-less shape supports this immediacy by refusing formal interruption, mirroring the uninterrupted circling of the dancers.

Conclusion

Williams's poem is a brisk, sensory translation of Bruegel's Kermess that celebrates communal, bodily life while remaining alert to comic and material detail. By focusing on motion, sound, and the savor of the body, the poem turns a painted festival into a lived, momentary scene that emphasizes both the pleasures and the human ordinariness of celebration.