| |
 Our
topic this week is Dance. There is a link between dance and poetry:
in Greek mythology, Terpsichore was the Muse of Lyric Poetry and
the Dance. There were two other Muses for poetry: Erato was the
Muse of Love Poetry, and Calliope, who was the first in rank among
the nine Muses, was the Muse of Epic Poetry and Eloquence. For
those of you interested, Clio was the Muse of History; Thalia
the Muse of Comedy; Melpomene the Muse of Tragedy; and Polyhymnia
the Muse of Mimic Art. She was generally portrayed with her finger
in her mouth! Euterpe was the Muse of Flute Playing; and Urania
was the Muse of Astronomy. The Muses were part of the retinue
of Apollo. Apollo was first of all a god of light. He was also
a god of the spring, and at Delos and Delphi the first crops were
therefore consecrated to him. He was also the god of divination
and prophecy. Finally, he was the god of song and the lyre. For
those of you who want to follow this further, all of the above
comes from the New
Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology.
It will come
as no surprise, then, that dance appears in much early literature.
In the Bible, Ecclesiastes, 3:1-4 says:
To everything
there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a
time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and
a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a
time to dance;
And, of course,
we remember that Salome, “the daughter of Herodias, danced before
them, and pleased Herod.”
Homer in
the Iliad; Book XIII, has Polydamas saying “Hector, you
are an obstinate man when it comes to taking advice. Just because
Heaven has made you a magnificent fighter, you like to think that
you know better than anyone else how to plan a battle too. But
you cannot take everything on yourself. People differ in their
gifts. One man can fight, another dance, or play the lute and
sing; and yet another is endowed by all-seeing Zeus with a good
brain, to the frequent advantage of his friends, whom it saves
from disaster time and again, as he knows even better than
they do.” (This is from the translation by E. V. Rieu.). However,
in the Odyssey, Book XIV, Ulysses arrives in disguise at
the house of Eumæus, his faithful old servant, who entertains
him as a distinguished stranger. During the meal, he is offered
more wine, and says:
The wine
urges me on, the bewitching wine,
Which sets even a wise man to singing and to laughing gently,
And rouses him up to dance and brings forth words which were
better unspoken.
 Christopher
Marlowe (1564 – 1593) wrote a play resembling Shakespeare’s historic
plays: this one dealt with King Edward II. He was a homosexual,
and his favorite before he became king was Piers Gaveston. On
the death of his father, Edward sends a letter to Gaveston to
join him at court in England; and this is the opening of the play.
Gaveston is addressed by three poor men, but he dismisses them,
and they leave, saying they will wait about the court. As they
leave, Gaveston says:
Do. These
are not men for me,
I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians, that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant King which way I please.
Music and poetry is his delight;
Therefore I'll have Italian masks by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat feet dance the antic hay.
Sometime a lovely boy in Dian's shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
And in his sportful hands an olive tree,
To hide those parts which men delight to see,
Shall bathe him in a spring; and there, hard by,
One like Actæon, peeping through the grove,
Shall by the angry goddess be transformed,
And running in the likeness of an hart,
By yelping hounds pulled down, shall seem to die:
Such things as these best please his majesty,
My lord! Here comes the King and the nobles
From the parliament. I'll stand aside.
Shakespeare
(1564 – 1616) speaks about dance in The Taming of the Shrew.
In Act II, Scene I, Katherina (the shrew) and her sister Bianca
get involved in a spat, and their father Baptista breaks it up
and restrains Katherina from chasing after her sister. Katherina
responds by saying:
What, will
you not suffer me? Nay, now I see
She is your treasure, she must have a husband;
I must dance barefoot on her wedding-day,
And, for your love to her, lead apes in hell.
Talk not to me: I will go sit and weep,
Till I can find occasion of revenge.
In Much
Ado About Nothing, Act II, Scene I, there is this exchange
between Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, and Beatrice, niece of Leonato,
the Governor of Messina:
DON PEDRO.
Will you have me, lady?
BEATRICE
No, my lord, unless I might have another for working-days: your
grace is too costly to wear every day. But I beseech your grace,
pardon me: I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.
DON PEDRO
Your silence most offends me, and to be merry most becomes you;
for, out of question, you were born in a merry hour.
BEATRICE
No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star
danced, and under that was I born.
Thomas Nash
(1567 – 1601) had this well known little fragment, written in
1600:
Spring,
the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring.
 John
Milton (1608 – 1674) had a similar idea, in L’Allegro,
written in 1631:
And the
jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth, and many a maid,
Dancing in the checkered shade.
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday.
John Dryden
(1631 – 1700) wrote a piece called The Secular Masque;
and although it was in fact his first work, it was published just
before he died:
CHORUS OF ALL
With shouting and hooting, we pierce through the sky,
And Echo turns hunter, and doubles the cry.
JANUS
Then our age was in its prime,
CHRONOS
Free from rage,
DIANA
--And free from crime.
MOMUS
A very merry, dancing, drinking,
Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time.
CHORUS OF ALL
Then our age was in its prime,
Free from rage, and free from crime,
A very merry, dancing, drinking,
Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time.
Alexander
Pope (1688 – 1744), in An
Essay on Criticism (which is essential reading for all
would-be poets!) has this penetrating thought:
True ease
in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offence;
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
 William
Blake (1757 – 1827) has a nice little poem in Songs
of Experience; it is called The Fly. Here are the first
three stanzas:
Little
Fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Am not
I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
Sir Walter
Scott (1771 – 1832) has not appeared very often in our pieces
here, but this is a fragment from The
Lay of the Last Minstrel:
In peace,
Love tunes the shepherd’s reed,
In war, he mounts the warrior’s steed;
In halls, in gay attire is seen;
In hamlets, dances on the green.
Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,
And men below, and saints above;
For love is heaven, and heaven is love.
 George
Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) has this, in Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage, III, st. 22:
Did ye
not hear it? - No! ‘twas but the wind,
Or the car rattling o’er the stony street.
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
John Keats
(1795 – 1821), in Ode
to a Nightingale (a poem we have quoted more than once
in these pages!) has this:
O, for
a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O, for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.
With beaded dubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth.
And then,
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892) in Maud:
All night
have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon;
All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d
To the dancers dancing in tune;
Till a silence fell with the waking bird,
And a hush with the setting moon.
We have quoted
from The Owl
and the Pussycat, by Edward Lear (1812 – 1888) several
times, but you may remember that after they got married:
They dined
on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on he edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon.
 Oscar
Wilde (1854 – 1900) wrote a poem called The
Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898, while he was incarcerated
there. He was greatly moved by the presence there of a prisoner
who was sentenced to hang. This is a stanza relating to that,
which has a different view of dancing:
It is sweet
to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!
William Butler
Yeats (1865 – 1939) was also Irish, of course; and the general
idea of dancing was (then as now) common in Ireland. Here is The
Fiddler of Dooney:
When I
play my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea.
And in his
collection Responsibilities (1914) is To a Child Dancing
in the Wind:
Dance there
upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?
In The
Tower (1928) there is a poem Among School Children.
The final couplet is:
O body
swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can one know the dancer from the dance?
Robert Frost
(1874 – 1963) in his collection A
Witness Tree (1942) has this very short poem, The Secret
Sits:
We dance
round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
T.S. Eliot
(1888 –1965) uses the image of dance from time to time; his most
extended description is in the second of the Four
Quartets: East Coker (1940):
In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
 Edward
Estlin Cummings (1894 – 1962) also mentions dance a few times:
I have used a poem of his, anyone
lived in a pretty how town (1940) here before:
Anyone
lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.
He also wrote
a large prose work, The Enormous Room, published in 1922,
which contains the following interesting fragment:
For he
has the territory of harmonicas, the acres of flutes, the meadows
of clarinets, the domain of violins. And God says: Why did they
put you in prison? What did you do to the people? 'I made them
dance and they put me in prison. The soot-people hopped; and
to twinkle like sparks on a chimney-back and I made 80 francs
every dimanche, and beer and wine, and to eat well. Maintenant
. . . c'est fini.... Et tout de suite' (gesture of cutting
himself in two) 'la tête.' And He says: O you who
put the jerk into joys, come up hither. There's a man up here
called Christ who likes the violin.
Another favorite
of mine, Ogden Nash (1902 – 1971) has a great little poem relating
to our subject (1935):
There is
something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth –
I think that perhaps it’s the gin.
Anne Sexton
(1928 – 1974) wrote a strange (and amusing) poem, Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs (1971), and perhaps we will have the
opportunity to look at it in more detail another week; it contains
the fragment:
Beauty
is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
Of course,
there are many popular songs that are about dancing, but this
week I thought I would steer clear of that field, tempting as
it is! It will not stop me using a work that is perhaps better
known as a song than as a poem, however! I use it because it is
about Ireland. It was written by an interesting character, William
Percy French (1854 – 1920); it is Phil
the Fluter’s Ball.
William Percy
French was born at Cloonyquin, County Roccommon, Ireland. He was
the second son of landowner Christopher French, L.D., J.P. and
his wife Susan Emma (nee Percy) the daughter of a clergyman. The
Frenches were descended from one of the famous merchant tribes
of Galway but in the face of changing social and economic conditions
their fortunes were somewhat on the decline. William studied engineering
at Trinity College, Dublin, where he spent a lot of time in song
writing, dramatics, banjo playing and watercolour painting. After
an unusually long number of years French emerged from university
with an engineering qualification. In 1883 he was about to emigrate
to Canada when he obtained a post on a government drainage scheme
in County Cavan. Here, the self-styled 'Inspector Of Drains' also
found scope to develop his interest in music and drama, whilst
a series of spectacular sunsets, caused by the effects of a far
distant volcanic eruption, fuelled his enthusiasm for watercolor
painting. His job ended abruptly in 1888. Subsequently, in Dublin,
French was for two years editor of a comic weekly magazine called
'The Jarvey'. He availed of this medium to promote a series of
concerts throughout Ireland under the banner of 'The Jarvey Concert
Company' and to advertise his ever increasing output of comic
songs. Following the demise of 'The Jarvey', French, never far
from the footlights, provided the libretto and played the leading
role in two comic operas (music by his friend and collaborator,
Dr.W.H.Collisson). In 1891, his first wife, Ettie, died in childbirth,
just one year and one day after their marriage; their baby daughter
died a few days later. At fifty, French moved to London and performed
on stage until his death in 1920; he is buried in Formby, Lancashire.
In addition
to Phil the Fluter’s Ball, he wrote a number of other comic
poems, notably Abdul Abulbul Amir and The Mountains
of Mourne. Here is a little epigram of his, called Remember
Me:
Remember
me is all I ask,
And yet
If the remembrance prove a task,
Forget.
I thought
it would be interesting to find poems related to specific dances.
Recently, I had occasion to quote from Tarantella
by Hilaire Belloc (1870 – 1953); and so I thought of the Tango
as a possibility. The major contributor to the poetry of the Tango
was Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986), who was an Argentinean, living
from 1921 in Buenos Aires. He wrote several poems relating to
the dance and the culture associated with it; his title for these
poems was Milonga. I have been able to find several of
them, but sadly not in translation, and my Spanish is inadequate
to essay a translation myself. For your interest, here is the
opening stanza of Milonga de los Hermanos (1965) (Milonga
of the Brothers) which is based on the story of Cain and Abel:
Traiga
cuentos la guitarra
de cuando el fierro brillaba,
cuentos de truco y de taba,
de cuadreras y de copas,
cuentos de la Costa Brava
y el Camino de las Tropas
In a future
article, I will have more to say about Borges, and by then I might
have a translation!
An obvious
alternative is the Waltz, which had a major influence on European
society when it was introduced. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751
– 1816) had this to say, in his poem The Waltz:
Behold
with downcast eyes and modest glance,
In measured step, a well-dressed pair advance,
One hand on hers, the other on
her hip,
For thus the law's ordained by
Baron Trip.
'Twas in such posture our first parents moved,
When hand in hand through Eden's bowers they roved,
Ere yet the devil with practice foul
and false
Turned their poor heads and taught them how to waltz.
 The
waltz poem I have selected for this week is My
Papa’s Waltz, by Theodore Roethke (1908- 1963). Roethke
was educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard University.
His first book of poetry was Open House, published in 1941:
W. H. Auden called it ‘completely successful’. He suffered in
his later life with manic depression, for which he was hospitalized
on a number of occasions. This poem was published in 1948.
My choice
for the last poem was a real problem. I have a particular fondness
for the creation of archy the cockroach and mehitabel the dissolute
cat by Donald Robert Perry Marquis (1878 – 1937). Here is a small
but typical fragment, from archy’s life of mehitabel (1934):
i would
rather kill my own
rats and share
them with a
friend from Greenwich
village than lap up
cream or beef juice
from a silver porringer
and have to
be polite to the
bourgeois clans
that feed me
wot the hell i
feel superior to that
stupid bunch me
for a dance
across the roofs when
the red star
calls to my blood
none of your
pretty puss stuff for
mehitabel it would
give me a grouch
to have to be so
solemn toujours
gai archy toujours
gai is my
motto
So instead,
I remembered that while the waltz was regarded as very racy at
the beginning of the 19th Century, the dance that was regarded
as truly wicked at that time was the quadrille. Fortunately, there
is a poem about the quadrille -- it was written by Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898). It is, of
course, The
Lobster Quadrille, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
So there
we are. I shall close with John Milton again again from L’Allegro:
Haste thee,
Nymph, and bring with thee
Jest, and youthful Jollity,
Quips and cranks and wanton wiles,
Nods and becks and wreathed smiles
Such as hang on Hebe’s cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek;
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
Come, and trip it, as you go,
On the light fantastic toe;
And in thy right hand lead with thee
The mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty;
And, if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew,
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreproved pleasures free ...
|
|
