A Drunken Man's Praise of Sobriety
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1938. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2034, and this site is served partly from American servers. So for now we give the notes without the full text; it will appear here in 2034.
It begins: Come swish around, my pretty punk
In brief
SummaryA drunk man begs his dancing partner to keep him upright.
A drunken man speaks to the woman he is dancing with. As long as she keeps him dancing, he says, he can stay sober however much he drinks, so he praises sobriety as a jewel while the other drinkers lie snoring. Then the song darkens: under every dancer lies a dead man in his grave. He asks her to move smoothly, like a mermaid, and ends with a joke that is also a warning: a drunkard is a dead man, and all the dead are drunk.
Lines to remember
And all dead men are drunk.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 8Keep me dancing
He calls his partner to swish around and keep him on his feet, so that he may count as sober though he drinks his fill. He claims to adore sobriety, a comic claim from a man who needs to keep moving to avoid collapsing like the snoring drunkards.
Lines 9 to 12The dead below
"Mind your feet", he says twice, and asks her to dance like a wave. Suddenly the floor opens: beneath every dancer is a dead man in his grave. The dance becomes a way of staying above death.
Lines 13 to 16Drunk as the dead
He wants no staggering, and renames her a mermaid, graceful and of the sea. The closing lines turn the idea around: to be drunk is to be dead, and the dead are the drunkest of all, lying still and senseless.
Themes
Dance and life
Dancing is what keeps the speaker alive and upright. The instruction to keep dancing "like a wave" makes motion itself a kind of sobriety, a balance kept only by never stopping. It is a comic version of a serious idea in late Yeats: energy and movement as the answer to age and death.
Death
The line about a dead man under every dancer brings the grave into a pub song. The final paradox, that drunkards are dead and the dead are drunk, is a riddle as well as a joke: both lie senseless, and both have given up the effort of standing.
Context
The poem was first published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1938). It belongs with the many songs Yeats wrote in his last years in the voices of drinkers, wanderers and wild old men, rough and bawdy in tone but often turning on death and the body.
Form
Sixteen short lines alternating four and three beats, in ballad metre, with the shorter lines rhyming (still and fill, adore and snore, wave and grave, punk and drunk). The bouncing rhythm suits a tipsy dance, while the repeated "O mind your feet" catches the unsteady steps.