People struggle with so many things right now—fear of sickness and death, loss of livelihood and home, simple loneliness. The worst is not quite yet, and so much anxiety results from not knowing how long this will last. More people than otherwise normally would also now struggle with a species of what artists struggle with daily: how to cultivate solitude, the kind that nourishes rather than destroys.

In the months to come, there’ll be time enough for poems of quarantine and poems of inspiration, the two kinds I see circulating right now with the greatest frequency. I chose, instead, a poem of solitude that enjoys healthy circulation and was written by a doctor no less.

William Carlos Williams
Danse Russe

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,-
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,-

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

We’re all in our households more of late, and it’s likely none of us feels ecstatic about it. We might be crying “I am lonely, lonely” for very different reasons. What’s moving about the poem is how it gets to this eminently quotable final sentiment. What’s the equation in which loneliness, a grotesque dance, and a setting sun adds up to genius? What makes loneliness best?

We find, in the poem, a man alone, although it seems this man might need isolation more than any of us do. Or maybe he has no longing for it. Perhaps he doesn’t feel the pressures of his relationships. Instead there’s just something in the air that draws him into this naked moment of unexpected motion.

I’ll get to the quality of that motion but not before I say that my favorite lines have always been

and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,-

The guttural cry, “I am lonely” has its own appeal, of course. But I love these lines more, in part for the clarity of images, something Williams was known for. There’s something about the rhythm of the lines, which in fact scans as roughly iambic but stops feeling that way by the final lines. Something about “above shining trees” feels drawn out, like spondees, even though they aren’t. One rhythm overlies another. They don’t quite fit, the result of which is to drive the reader breathlessly on.

It’s no wonder I was drawn to this poem. It cherishes loneliness. It transforms loneliness from dirge to dance. But it’s the quality of dance I’ve been wondering about. Sure, there’s a form of dance here we’re all familiar with—the kind of abandon we might practice when we think we’re utterly alone, although many of us lack the courage for even that. There’s nothing harder, sometimes, than being naked.

But then there’s that title, which makes me wonder what Williams was thinking about in the nineteen teens, just a few years after Igor Stravinsky’s odd and now-rarely performed ballet Petrushka, which premiered in 1911 and the first movement of which is called “Danse Russe.” A vibrant slice of that movement appears here with the score. I was lucky to discover this a few years ago at La Scala on an all Stravinsky program. It is, quite simply, unforgettable.

The world of Petrushka is a world of dolls, of puppets, to be more precise, animated by the will of a cruel creator figure called the Charlatan, who brings them to life to perform at a Shrovetide Fair. Complex erotic scenarios arise. Petrushka falls in love with the ballerina who will not love him back. She falls in love with a Moor who Petrushka challenges to a duel. Petrushka dies and then returns to life long enough to curse the Charlatan before dying again.

Stravinsky’s characteristically off-kilter composition is undeniable in its pinpoint barrage of violins and piano. Listening to it, you feel you can never quite catch the rhythm and in this it feels like things to come in Stravinsky’s 1913 Rite of Spring. And yet, my husband tells me when I ask, it’s in 2/4, a sort of march, a simple duple (or double) time. But the salvo of sixteenth notes makes it feel otherwise, as if there are two competing rhythms the confluence of which drives its hearers forward as if in frenzied motion. Michel Fokine choreographed Petrushka and created the title role on the great Vaslav Nijinksy, with movement characterized by a precise and intended awkwardness. The dolls seem to strange to be human, their motion too articulated and attenuated. In one painful scene all three “dance,” their limbs jerking awkwardly to Stravinsky from the pegs on which they are hung.

So what does any of this have to do with William Carlos Williams? We know a gorgeously grotesque dance of loneliness happens under the cover of the vespertinal hours when all others sleep. But is our lonely doctor, our happy genius, also a puppet with someone pulling his strings? Does he wonder how human he really is in the late hours of the day? Is the movement we imagine a little less gorgeous and a little more grotesque? Many poems refer to music, of course, and often by composition. It hadn’t quite occurred to me that a poem might be utterly transformed if you imagined it had a different soundtrack than the one you anticipated. Or that it had a soundtrack at all. Which makes me wonder if ever, in the many many times I have read, taught, and loved this poem, if I ever imagined the music of its world and not just the music of its language. (Which in turn makes me wonder what else I’m missing from the many poems I’ve known and loved for years. I suppose that’s the comfort in returning to works we love).

We may not, just now, feel it’s best to be lonely. We many not feel like happy geniuses. I certainly don’t. I had always thought of this poem as uplifting, and I think that’s not wrong. But perhaps I should say that it might more precisely but precariously balance generative and destructive forms of solitude. That, at least, is what this doctor ordered.