the dancers go round

My second internal structure poem is The Dance by Willam Carlos Williams on page 1009 of the Norton.

This poem, unlike Heaven, is made up of one stanza. Only divided into two sentences, the words flow together and intermingle and recreate the hectic and festive scene in the actual painting. The descriptive language and many verbs lend a sense of chaos to the poem that can be seen in the painting. While fair-goers dance, they also "impound" alcohol, and the language crammed into the blocked structure show the drunkenness and even bawdiness of the people.

If this poem was divided into stanzas, it would be too organized. All the action in the poem remains clumped together in the one stanza, so it seems to be bursting out of it. Despite the dynamic action and syntax of the poem, it is really about the painting, which is a motionless, docile thing. The repetition of the line "In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess" at the beginning and the end serves to frame the description of the painting that occurs in the middle.