The Dancers by Edith Sitwell
The floors are slippery with blood:The world gyrates too. God is good
That while His wind blows out the light
For those who hourly die for us –
We still can dance each night.
The music has grown numb with death –
But we will suck their dying breath,
The whispered name they breathed to chance,
To swell our music, make it loud
That we may dance, - may dance.
We are the dull blind carrion-fly
That dance and batten. Though God die
Mad from the horror of the light –
The light is mad, too, flecked with blood, -
We dance, we dance, each night.
If you just read “The Dancers” by Edith Sitwell, you might have experienced the same shock I did when I realized this poem was not about women but about flies that feast on dead flesh. The author, unlike many female First World War poets, is actually quite famous. She is more known for her World War Two poetry that is "of tragic grandeur and intensity.”* A lot of her works were considered experimental, drew heavily on religion, used unique rhythms, and employed “private allusions.”** The carrion-fly is not a private allusion, however, it does make you wonder what exactly the author was thinking when she wrote “The Dancers.”
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| Edith Sitwell |
When I first read Sitwell’s poem, I immediately thought it was a piece about women that echoed the sentiments of many other poets - women and those on the homefront are living a happy, carefree life while men die in the trenches. When she talks about “those who hourly die for us” I immediately assumed she meant soldiers dying for the people at home who “can still dance each night” because of that sacrifice. I only become further invested in that metaphor with the idea of “we will suck their dying breath.” It reads like the author believes the people at home are stealing life away from the soldiers who are fighting and dying for them.
But that isn’t what the poem is about, as the final stanza reveals. The poem is about the carrion-fly (pictured below) eating the flesh of the dead, dancing on the flesh of the dead. Or is it? Maybe my first interpretation holds true. Perhaps Sitwell is comparing women and those who stay at home to the carrion-fly because they both are getting to dance and be happy only because people are dying. Death is necessary for their survival. It’s a bleak interpretation and somewhat Sassoon-like in that it doesn’t speak very highly of those at home. Honestly, I think "The Dancers" could be read literally or metaphorically, but I personally prefer the bleakness of the metaphorical interpretation.
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| A carrion-fly. I'll spare you the pictures of them on actual decaying flesh. |
To conclude, there is one specific part of the poem that I want to highlight. I found the idea of “the light” particularly compelling. If God’s wind is blowing out the light, then the light must be human life blown out by God on the battlefield. Based on the legend of the three Fates cutting the string of life that I talked about in my post on “The Ballad of the Three Spectres” by Ivor Gurney, I interpret “the light” to be the human soul being snuffed out by God. Carrying that interpretation to the final stanza where Sitwell says “Though God die/Mad from the horror of the light-/The light is mad” continues the bleak theme that was started when Sitwell compared those on the homefront to carrion flies.
This poem puts on the page the idea that God is dead, something Fussell and the films discussed. Now, not only is God dead, but he is killed by that madness caused by seeing how terrible the human soul is. The human soul is insane and so terrible it has driven God to fatal insanity.
*https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edith-Sitwell
**https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edith-sitwell
*https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edith-Sitwell
**https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edith-sitwell
I definitely read it more as her comparing those who aren’t fighting to flies than the poem being strictly about flies. “Bleak” is a great way to describe it; she seems very disillusioned by the whole thing. Those at home get to “dance,” but God has died from madness because the “light,” or the men still on the battlefield, are mad, too, it seems. Everybody’s bad and contributing to a feast for the flies! I think that’s also why I don’t view it as being over harsh on those back home; she deals out her bleakness so widely and evenly that it almost feels fair.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read this poem, the element of music immediately stood out to me. I thought that while Sitwell uses the element of music to attack those who dance each night despite the thousands of soldiers dying, music could also be seen in this poem as a distraction to take ones mind off of the horrors of the war. In Sitwell’s poem, she writes “The whispered name they breathed to chance,// To swell our music, make it loud// That we may dance,- may dance,” as if turning up the volume of the music would allow listeners to forget about the violence of the war. This idea is also seen in Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s “He Went for a Soldier.” The young soldier discussed in the story does not understand the war, but as civilians played music in the streets he became too distracted by the sound of the music to care: “Not very clear in the kind young heart of him// What the fuss was about,//… The music drowned his doubt.” Both poems depict a sense that by increasing the volume and sound of music, the sorrows and doubts of the war would fade away.
ReplyDeleteSome interesting research I found about this poem was the “Great Battle” that she includes in her title—“During a Great Battle, 1916”—is the battle of the Somme in which 57,000 men died on the first day and 420,000 men would die at the end of the battle in November.
https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/the-dancers/
I love the idea of women being the flies on the wall; they see everything and often go unacknowledged for the hard work they do. In the case of flies, their hard work is really gross, but it is completely necessary and important! "Death is necessary for their survival" is a really interesting analysis of this comparison, because I never really thought about it like that, but that does seem to be the case. Not necessarily their physical survival, but because wartime was the first time women were allowed to do more than be a seamstress or a drugstore cashier or a secretary. Death was necessary for the survival of their livelihoods. People getting money from the government while the men of the household were at war also really shows this I think. If it weren't for the war, a lot of them wouldn't have been able to put food on the table, which seems really ironic, but was the case with lower class families that had lots of children. This comment is kind of rambly, but I hope I got some semblance of a point across!
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to lie, when I first read this poem I was confused and had to immediately go back and read it again. The fact that the speaker of the poem (the carrion fly) wasn't revealed until the last stanza seems very deliberate. By revealing the speaker at the end, Sitwell leaves the reader in shock. I think this is done in order to cause the reader to contemplate the previous stanzas and attempt to uncover the exact meaning of the poem.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your interpretation that Sitwell is comparing women sitting at home to the carrion-fly. Reading the poem through this lens, Sitwell is angry at these women who are sitting at home while men go off to fight in the war, but it is interesting to me that Sitwell is also one of these women.
I was also extremely interested by Sitwell's word choice. There are many words throughout the poem that seem so carefully chosen. For example "slippery" and "gyrate" are (in my opinion) disgusting images, making the setting seem like something out of a horror film.