The+Wedding+Dance+in+the+Open+Air

Pieter Brueghel's //The Kermess//, the inspiration for Williams' "The Wedding Dance in the Open Air."

"The Wedding Dance in the Open Air" appears in Williams' collection //Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems//.

In "The Measured Dance: Williams' 'Pictures from Brueghel,'" Joel Conarroe states of this poem, "Williams uses what is for him an unusual rhythm, regular dactyls, to convey the exuberance and the prancing (or galloping) movement of the dance. He also conveys the circularity of the painting by using the same line at the beginning and end, thereby giving a sense of repeated, unbroken motion. The image of going 'round and / around' is picked up in the later poem which, if not so rhythmically intense, communicates the same feeling of spontaneous vitality" (575).