Winter Break Blog #2 (Danse Russe by WCW)

Like Sylvia Plath's poem, i kind of just read this for fun the first time. It was super cute sounding!! Like it seemed like this person who just decided to embrace their state of being alone and embrace who they are and all their imperfections, or was trying to, and just kind danced around their room. That's all I really took away from it when reading it the first time. I honestly didn't even know what I would be expected to answer on a test about it, because I didn't get anything else out of when reading it the first time.
Again, reading it the second time I tried to analyze every part of it, instead of just summarizing it as a whole. I started with the title, "Danse Russe." It looked like it was in a foreign language, and I remembered briefly learning about W.C Williams in Mazza's and that he was like french?? So I put it into google translate (it was french) and it came out as 'Russian Dance," which I'm not sure how to take (maybe it just relates to how emphatic typical Russian folk dances are???). So I just went line by line from there. The first three lines establish the setting and character (in a house, he's got a wife and kid and someone named Kathleen (nanny?)). The next three continue the setting, providing morning imagery and let the readers know the time of day.  When the speaker starts talking about the dancing, he describes it as "grotesque," because it's probably not something society would expect from a father. It refers to all this passion disconnected from the constraints of society. The speaker is kind of coming to terms with himself and his body, and the part of him that has been suffocated by society and domestic life and the expectations that come with it. After, he talks about being lonely, I guess because he can't fully be himself when he's around his family and out in society, and he's at his best when he's alone, when he's lonely, when he can just be himself.  He finally accepts his body and any imperfections, while, in the last two lines, showing that he can still be the strong head of house. he can both be this ambitious, real person, and this important father figure.