Street Dancers

Two ragged children dance in a London street, happy in their ignorance.

On a dim London street two ragged children sing and dance by lamplight, like "Larger sparrows of the town". Far away, the stars shine over woods and fields. The speaker imagines other children dancing elsewhere: in a country lane by moonlight, on a South Sea island, in a Bedouin camp. After each vision comes the same refrain: if these London children knew of such joys, would they still dance so lightly? The answer each time is no. The last full stanza names the difference. Children elsewhere know "the healing earth"; London's inheritance is "Blinder sorrows, harder wage", the grinding poverty of the city. Their happiness, the poem suggests, depends on not knowing what they lack.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 8The London children

   Two "ragged children bright" sing and dance to the beat of their own feet by "a window's feeble light". They are "Larger sparrows of the town", nesting in the brown city fog. Far off, beyond the streets, the "starry mirth" hangs over a "wooded earth" they have never seen.

2. Lines 9 to 13The first refrain

   The refrain asks whether, if they knew of "a wide wood's leafy leisure", they would still "foot so fleet a measure", that is, dance so quickly and lightly. The clipped two-word last line gives the answer: they would not, because knowing would spoil their joy.

3. Lines 14 to 21Children in a lane

   The speaker pictures country children dancing in "some far lane" by moonlight, watched by poplars. They hush one another, a "chubby finger-tip" on every lip, to hear the call of "the lone nightjar" from the fields. Nature itself provides their music.

4. Lines 22 to 26The second refrain

   The refrain returns, now changed: "Other people's mirth and pleasure" replaces the leafy wood. From here its wording stays fixed until the final stanza, a chorus the reader comes to expect, always turning back to the London street.

5. Lines 27 to 34The South Seas

   The vision moves to "some isle of isles" in the southern ocean, where island children dance on the sand and stop to point at a rolling shell "Dropping liquid rainbow light". The phrase "savage children" reflects the attitudes of the poem's time.

6. Lines 35 to 39The third refrain

   The same four questioning lines and the same answer come round again. Placed between the bright, far-off scenes, the refrain keeps pulling the reader back to the "feeble glow" in which the London children dance.

7. Lines 40 to 47The Bedouin camp

   Now a Bedouin family's children run laughing past spears, dry palm stems and a camel's "dreaming eye", then fall silent beside an old man with "whitening hair". Youth and age are at peace together: "Thoughtless joys and sorrows sage".

8. Lines 48 to 52The fourth refrain

   The refrain comes back unchanged for a fourth time. By now its question sounds less like a comfort and more like a lament for the narrow lives of the London children, who have only the street to dance in.

9. Lines 53 to 60London's inheritance

   The last full stanza states the contrast. Others "know the healing earth" and go to their graves "placid browed", even when worn by sorrow. London's children inherit "Blinder sorrows, harder wage": the "Sordid sorrows of the mart" that sap both brain and heart.

10. Lines 61 to 65The final refrain

    The refrain closes the poem with one last change: "All the healing earth may treasure". If the children knew everything the earth could offer them, they would stop dancing. The poem ends holding their happiness and its fragility together.

Themes

Context

This is one of the early poems Yeats later dropped from his collections. It is set in London, where the Yeats family lived for much of his youth and where he often felt homesick for Sligo. Its contrast between city streets and healing countryside belongs with "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", written in London in 1888, though here the longing is felt on behalf of the children rather than the poet himself.

Form

Sixty-five lines of four-beat rhyming couplets in a quick, skipping rhythm ("Singing in this London street"). Eight-line stanzas of description alternate with a five-line refrain that ends on a two-word line. The refrain's wording shifts, from "a wide wood's leafy leisure" to "All the healing earth may treasure", so the chorus carries the argument forward.