Analysis of The Dance

William Carlos Williams 1883 (Rutherford) – 1963 (Rutherford)



In 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


Scheme AbcadeafagaA
Poetic Form
Metre 0111001 010111110 010100100 1011010010 101101101 101011101 110110110 1111001001 01110111 1111111101 100101111 0111001
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 496
Words 86
Sentences 2
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 12
Lines Amount 12
Letters per line (avg) 33
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 400
Words per stanza (avg) 84
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 03, 2023

26 sec read
1,448

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was a Latino-American poet closely associated with modernism and imagism. more…

All William Carlos Williams poems | William Carlos Williams Books

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