Today’s Poem: Ballet School

Babette Deutsch, the “Small Clean School,” artistic discipline, and the perilous potency of joy

Edgar Degas, Dancer, before 1917 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Ballet School

by Babette Deutsch

Fawns in the winter wood 
Who feel their horns, and leap, 
Swans whom the bleakening mood 
Of evening stirs from sleep, 
Tall flowers that unfurl 
As a moth, driven, flies, 
Flowers with the breasts of a girl 
And sea-cold eyes. 
The bare bright mirrors glow 
For their enchanted shapes. 
Each is a flame, and so, 
Like flame, escapes.
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Today’s Poem by Babette Deutsch (1895–1982), taken from her 1925 second collection, Honey Out of the Rock, feels in some ways like a poem we’ve seen before. Or if not exactly that, it feels of a piece with a kind of poem we’ve come to identify with women poets of the 1920s: brief, imagistic, lyric, and characterized by what Elinor Wylie identified as a “small clean technique.” If we were going to identify a school of women poets of this era, we might well call it the Small Clean School and include in it not only Wylie, but also Sara Teasdale, whose “There Will Be Stars” we’ve recently examined as an exemplar of this minimalist technique.

While these poets don’t absolutely eschew events relayed chronologically, as narrative, (see Teasdale’s “Summer Night, Riverside” and “A Winter Bluejay,” for example), their defining concern is with the isolation of a particular moment, suspended outside time — though even that suspension may be transient or illusory. The context of Wylie’s “A Crowded Trolley Car” is, as the title suggests, a trolley, moving from stop to stop in a linear progression. Yet once the clanging bell and the swaying of the car are dispensed with, that movement never again intrudes on the view of hands clutching the rail and the omniscient speaker’s meditation on what those hands reveal. Time stills; its movements are of no concern. What matters is the image of each hand and the associations that unfold from it.

Deutsch’s own technique shares both Wylie’s predilection for imagistic miniatures and Teasdale’s intimations of rapture. But where Teasdale’s joys verge on pain, Deutsch’s literary persona — as we’ve previously seen in her 1919 poem, “Silence” — seems, to a great extent, genuinely and generatively open to happiness. It’s easy to think of happiness as inimical to art, or even to interest: “Happy families are all alike,” and so forth. It’s easy to think of the definitive bitterness of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, as well as the veiled despair of Sara Teasdale, and to forget that some women of the same generation were relatively happy in love, did not live their lives continually on a precipice, and declined to nurse a continual state of regret as energy source and fodder for art. And those women — Janet Loxley Lewis and Genevieve Taggard, for example, as well as Babette Deutsch — made good art.

Babette Deutsch in 1939 (New York Public Library)

“Ballet School” reflects the “small clean” imagistic technique that suited these writers so well. It takes up, too, their concern with the way a moment in time may open out into the intimation of larger things. In the poem, girls not yet women are rehearsing the stylized positions, steps, and movements of classical dance. Like any art, ballet is a discipline; its constraints, paradoxically, make things possible. A dancer’s training is the source of artistic freedom, the method by which the body learns to move in the realm of imagination.

In a similar way, the poem exercises both discipline and freedom. Measured out in abab quatrains of, predominantly, accentual trimeter, it rests its eye on these dancing girls as they practice the disciplined movements that will admit them to a greater imaginative freedom. Even now, when they are only learning, the speaker-observer discerns the way that their art transfigures them, in a series of images that begin in potential — fawns with antlers still velveted, swans roused but not yet flying — but progressively flower, like the image of the flower itself, into something half-human, strange, and unsettling. All this possibility unfolds within the constraints of the poem’s form.

The “bare bright mirrors,” those wall-sized sheets of mirror that are a feature of every ballet studio, answer the girls’ “enchanted shapes” with their own glow. The mirrors multiply the number of the dancers and give them back their reflected selves as, in the final quatrain, they become another element altogether. Pure spirit, at least in imagination, they transcend the constraints of their bodies even as they inhabit them. In the same way, their existence in the poem, their evocation in words, is delineated by the precise, minimalist language and, at the same time, resonates with a larger life than the poem’s smallness might suggest.

The b-rhyme pair in that quatrain, “shapes/escapes,” hints at this paradox of definition and fluidity, of being simultaneously in and out of the body. The last line might be read as accentual trimeter like the rest of the poem, with stresses on all but the first syllable of the final word. It may just as plausibly be read as iambic dimeter, with stresses on the second and fourth syllables: a shift from the poem’s predominant pattern, mimicking the way that fire may, beautifully but dangerously, slip free of whatever contains it.

This is a poem whose intensity is joyful, not despairing. It is a poem about promise and potential, something that is beautiful now but also waits and prepares to transcend this moment of beauty. Like fire, that potential is perilous as much as it is anything else. But potential is potency, springing from the Latin word for power, and the speaker, watching these girls, perceives the transcendent power they rehearse. “Each is a flame, and so, / Like flame, escapes.”

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