Sweet Dancer
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: The girl goes dancing there
In brief
SummaryA troubled girl dances on a lawn, and the poet pleads for her.
A girl dances on the smooth, freshly mown grass of a garden. She has escaped from a bitter youth, from the crowd around her or from her own black cloud of mind. The refrain calls out to her tenderly. In the second stanza strange men may come from the house to take her away. The poet asks that no one tell them she is happy in her madness, but that they be gently led astray, so that she can finish her dance.
Lines to remember
Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!
Line by line
Lines 1 to 7Dancing on the grass
The girl dances on a garden lawn, the grass described in a rush of compound words. She has escaped from bitter youth and from her crowd, or from her own black cloud. The stanza ends on the fond refrain.
Lines 8 to 14Let her finish
If strange men come to lead her away, the speaker asks that no one say she is happy being crazy. Instead the men should be gently misled. The plea to let her finish her dance is repeated, then the refrain returns.
Themes
Madness and freedom
The dance is an escape from bitterness and from a "black cloud" of the mind. What looks like madness to the strange men is, for the moment, a kind of release. The poem does not pretend she is well, but it values the dance for its own sake.
Protection
The speaker's instinct is to shield her. He wants the men who come to take her misled, not confronted, and the repeated "Let her finish her dance" sounds like a whispered request. The tenderness of the refrain sets the tone of the whole song.
Context
The poem was first published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, May 1938). It is linked to Margot Ruddock, the actress and poet with whom Yeats had an intense friendship in 1934 to 1936; her breakdown in Majorca in 1936 lies behind this poem and one other late poem, usually taken to be "A Crazed Girl". The details of the garden and the men from the house are left unexplained, which keeps the song general and gentle.
Form
Two seven-line stanzas of short, mostly three-beat lines, each ending in the same refrain. Rhyme is light and irregular ("youth" and "smooth", "crowd" and "cloud", "away" and "astray"). The second stanza repeats its fifth line, so the refrain feels like a song that will not stop.