Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay
Form and Meter
A lot of the "The Dance" struts its stuff in a meter called amphibrachic trimeter. Seriously, we didn't make this up. Yeah, it kinda sounds like the name of some newly discovered dinosaur, and it m...
Speaker
The speaker of "The Dance" definitely doesn't spend a lot of time talking about himself. He's way too obsessed with this painting by Brueghel to bother telling us who he is, or what he's doing star...
Setting
The first line of the poem kinda places us in an art museum. When we read, "In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess," we imagine the speaker standing with his arms crossed, staring intently at the...
Sound Check
Sure, "The Dance" doesn't have any kind of regular rhyme scheme, but that doesn't mean that Williams doesn't make great use of sounds in this poem. Did you happen to catch how many B words there ar...
What's Up With the Title?
The title of the poem isn't exactly cryptic. This poem describes a painting that shows a bunch of peasants dancing, so it's called—wait for it—"The Dance." Well, maybe it's not quite that simpl...
Calling Card
William Carlos Williams kicked off his poetic career as part of the Imagist movement, a school of poetry headed up by his buddy Ezra Pound. This movement's main goal was to paint precise images wit...
Tough-o-Meter
You might think that a poem written in praise of a sixteenth-century Flemish painting would be a major mountain to climb. That's definitely not the case with "The Dance," however. Williams' simple,...
Trivia
"The Kermess" is also sometimes called "The Peasant Dance," which might be useful for you to know if you Google image search this bad boy. (Source.)Many, of the young poets Williams mentored went o...
Steaminess Rating
Okay, it is a wild party, but we hate to disappoint you. There's no sex in this poem whatsoever. Everyone is invited—BYOB (bring your own bagpipes).
Allusions
"The Kermess" by Brueghel the Elder