An Ode to a Dancer

(Isadora Duncan)

 

 

O Keats, thy Grecian urn has been upturned

And from its ashes is a woman made,

To dance them back again as when they burned

In young antiquity and pipes were played !

And who that early woman was that danced

Them dead, thou, Keats, wert born too late to know

And born too early for her later birth.

And yet thy lips of poesy could blow

Both lives, until their ankles met and glanced

Between the dead world and the unborn earth.

 

Here is thy living witness from the dead,

With the garment and the measure and the grace

Of a Greek maid, with the daisies on her head

And the daring of a new world in her face.

Dancing, she walks in perfect sacrifice.  .  .  .

Dancing, she lifts her beauty in her hands

And bears it to the altar, as a sign

Of joy in all the waters and the lands.

And while she praises with her pure device,

The breath she dances with, O Keats, is thine !

 

Life rises rippling through her like a spring,

Or like a stream it flows with deepening whirl.

Leaves in a wind taught her that fluttering

Of finger-tips.    She moves, a rosy girl

Caught in a rain of love; a prophetess

Of dust struck on the instant dumb with pain ;

A lovely melancholy being, wild

With remembering, with groping to attain

The edge and entrance of a wilderness,

To play again, untroubled as a child.

 

She strikes at death.    But the escaping foe

Awaits unwearied, knowing every wile.

Forward she comes to take the final blow -

And in defeat defies him with her smile. . . .

Upward she bears her throat to the keen thrust

Of triumph: - "O ye gods of time who give

And take, ye makers of beauty, though I die

In this my body, - beauty still shall live

Because of me and my Immortal dust ! -

O urn !    Take back my ashes!    It is I !"

 

Witter Bynner