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Of dancing

My dancing is, in my opinion, good,
 
In the right, cramped circumstances, and provided
 
Other people are too preoccupied with
 
Their own to notice mine. I am happy
 
To have lived in an informal age when
 
Standing and shaking in approximate rhythm, not
 
Bowing and guiding, is the idea. Because to
 
Have to know regulated steps and be skilful was what
 
I could never manage at all when it was the thing.
 
 
So I do dance. But I'm never entirely sure.
 
It’s a kind of movement you would never make
 
In the normal course, and how much it always seems
 
To obtrude on the natural in an embarassing
 
Way wherever people get it started!
 
Set it apart, on a stage, with a large
 
Orchestra, it’s all right, it’s undoubtedly clever,
 
And the costumes are glorious to gawp at, but
 
It still looks a little bit foolish, moving like that?
 
 
To speak of how all its origins are so
 
Utterly primal — the planets, the seasons,
 
The rhythms of mating, and so on, and so on,
 
Is to list a lot of fundamental things,
 
Explain them, and exorcise dancing:
 
Because simply why dance if you've come to understand
 
What dancing mimes so roughly, or makes such
 
A repetitive pantomime of? Sleights of courtship,
 
Postures of delight, grief, vanity, idolatry I see
 
 
All around me more sharp and subtle for not being
 
Done in a style. Dancing has social uses.
 
I know, but so did elemental spears and punches before
 
They invented tables for eating and conducting
 
Verbal negotiation (and does hands
 
Gripping slyly under a table ever happen
 
In the middle of fandango?)
 
Moreover, if the elemental stuff
 
Of dancing is banal, the ancient, ritual and customary
 
 
Panoply of "the dance" is incredibly peculiar;
 
Fellows in feathers, or kilts, or puma-skins,
 
Guys trinkling little bells down there in Hampshire,
 
Or folding arms over black boots flicking in the
 
Urals... one surely turns away to find somewhere quieter,
 
Where one needn't be part of a silly circle
 
Of grins, clapping hands in moronic unison (I once
 
Took a pocket torch in, to go on reading — The Listener,
 
I believe — all the way through a Gene Kelly musical).
 
 
For ostensible moralist reasons, the
 
Puritans disliked dancing: but they also
 
Opposed all giving and wearing of jewellery,
 
In which they may well have been right; so with dancing,
 
They may also have come at the truth
 
From a wrong, religious direction. But, down Oxford Street
 
These days, whatever the mortgage rate, there jogs
 
In shine or rain an irrelevant group of chanters
 
Shuffling to the rhythm of tiny cymbals, opposing
 
 
Shaven sublimity to the big, crude, selling
 
Metropolis around; and dancing, in sandals, for converts.
 
They'd like to see everyone join them... how unlikely,
 
I think; and how such unlikelihood shows
 
That most of us only don or discard our
 
Finery, to dance, in a fit of social desperation.
 
I recall that outside the Hammersmith Palais,
 
There once was an illuminated sign announcing
 
A group of performers known as THE SANDS OF TIME
 
 
For months, the words, I surmised, were a motto
 
Of that establishment: a thousand grains shaken
 
Nightly in that vast box, a thousand softies
 
Sifting for life-partners as the hours and days
 
Ticked on in tawdry, implacable rhythms. Yet the
 
Dancing prospers — telling how many the world leaves
 
Despoiled of words, of gestures diverse and specific,
 
Of shades of forehead, or hintings of finger-tips,
 
Or any more delicate tremor that speaks the whole thing;
 
 
And this is the crux. Tides vary, exact shelvings
 
Of pebbles on shores don't repeat, while patterns of clouds
 
Are never the same, are never patterns. Raindrops,
 
At unforeseen moments run, and weigh, down, minutely,
 
A million particular grass-blades: movement, movement,
 
Everlastingly novel shifts of a universe not
 
Gracelessly ordered, not presided by a setter of
 
Regulations. Vanity is so sad pretending to represent
 
Nature with humans dancing. Those who can move need not dance.

 
 
Dance Poetry
A comprehensive anthology
Edited by Alkis Raftis
Copyright 2012

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