The Wedding Dance in the Open Air
The Wedding Dance in the Open Air - fact Summary
Response to Bruegel's Painting
This poem is an ekphrastic rendering of a Pieter Bruegel painting, included in Williams’s Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems. It translates the canvas into terse, kinetic lines that emphasize circular motion, communal revelry, and earthy physicality. The speaker frames the scene as both choreographed by the artist and impulsive: peasant figures, women’s white headgear, and repetitive actions convey a vivid, visual snapshot of a boisterous outdoor wedding dance.
Read Complete AnalysesDisciplined by the artist to go round and round in holiday gear a riotously gay rabble of peasants and their ample-bottomed doxies fills the market square featured by the women in their starched white headgear they prance or go openly toward the wood’s edges round and around in rough shoes and farm breeches mouths agape Oya! kicking up their heels
Feel free to be first to leave comment.