Lines 1-6 Summary

Lines 1-2

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and

• The speaker kicks us off by letting us know that he's going to be talking about an awesome painting by Brueghel called "The Kermess."
• FYI: Brueghel the Elder is considered to be the best Flemish painter of the sixteenth century. (FYI, part 2: "Flemish" refers to someone from Flanders, a country that no longer officially exists, but was basically in Dutch-speaking northern Belgium.)
• And yet another FYI: a kermess is a Dutch folk celebration with lots of dancing, drinking, and all that good stuff. 
• Okay, enough with the FYI's.
• The speaker starts describing the painting by saying that it shows dancers dancing round and round. 
• Notice how he repeats "go round" twice, giving the feeling of the circular motion of the dancers. 
• The motion of the poem doesn't stop here either. 
• The last line spills directly over into the next, making use of a poetic device called enjambment. For more on this poem's form, go check out "Form and Meter," but hurry back.

Lines 3-4

around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

• As if all that stuff about the dancers going round wasn't enough in the line before, the speaker throws in another "around" at the top of line three for good measure. 
• Of course, any dance is incomplete without some music, so the speaker starts telling us about jams that are playing at this kermess. 
• Words like "squeal," "blare," and "tweedle" give us the feeling that the music is rowdy and maybe not so in tune.
• These words actually mimic the feel of these grating sounds so well that we'll go ahead and label them as onomatopoeia. Check out "Sound Check" for more on this poem's sounds.
• The point is that these musicians are way more concerned with having a blast than musical perfection. 
• Next, the speaker gives us a mini-list of the instruments that the musicians are playing: "bagpipes, a bugle, and fiddles." (Put those instruments together and you have the makings of a pretty awesome Dutch folk band—just in case you were thinking about starting one in your garage.)
• All in all, this talk of music adds a key element to the festive atmosphere that the poem and the painting it describes are trying to capture.

Lines 5-6

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)

• We're guessing these dancers have some pretty big bellies if they're going around "tipping" them everywhere. Hey, they may not be dancing back up for Beyonce anytime soon, but they're having a good time all the same.
• The speaker compares the dancers' bellies to the thick glasses that they're drinking beer from. All this beer drinking might also explain the roundness of their bellies—just sayin'. 
• Notice that the speaker brings back the word "round" here, but uses it in a different context from the opening lines.
• The dancers go round, the glasses are round—things are "round" all around here. This word repetition seems to be mirroring the revolving dancers and possibly the looping beat and melody of the song being played.
• We get more language music, too, with an internal rhyme of "round" and "impound." The beat is jumping here.