Internal Structure

The Dance
William Carlos Williams

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and thetweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddlestipping their bellies, (round as the thick-sided glasses whose wash they impound)their hips and their bellies off balanceto turn them. Kicking and rolling about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those shanks must be sound to bear up under such rollicking measures, prance as they dance in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess

At first notice, the most significant piece of the structure of this poem is that it begins and ends with the same line. This gives the poem a circular feel, as if it ends just where it started. I think that this quality is Williams commenting on "the dance". The poem resembles the dance that it depicts by ending where it started. This could be as simple as attempting to explain the dance or it could mean that the dance is insignificant, it is performed and nothing changes at all, everything is the same as when it started. This parallelism is certainly the most imporant piece of internal structure here.