hi, I was wondering whether anyone could help me with a homework task?
Basically, I have been set an essay on carol ann Duffy's ' Captain of the 1964 Top Of The Form Team' poem. I have no problems with this as such, as its based on themes of disconnection, the cruelty of time, disappointment etc.

However, the poem quotes the line : 'How can we know the dancer from the dance?' from 'Among School Children' by Yeats. It is meant to be ironic, as Duffy uses it to suggest the persona's feelings of alineation, but in the original poem it was apparently supposed to mean the opposite.

However, I'm having a little troube decipherng the meaning behind the original poem- was it a love poem, and culd it be about the sense of conection the poet feels with his lover?

Any suggestions about this would be much appreciated!

There is a discussion of that line here:
[www.geocities.com]


Les

The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team

Do Wah Diddy Diddy, Baby Love, Oh Pretty Woman
were in the Top Ten that month, October, and the Beatles
were everywhere else. I can give you the B-side
of the Supremes one. Hang on. Come See About Me?
I lived in a kind of fizzing hope. Gargling
with Vimto. The clever smell of my satchel. Convent girls.
I pulled my hair forward with a steel comb that I blew
like Mick, my lips numb as a two-hour snog.

No snags. The Nile rises in April. Blue and White.
The humming-bird's song is made by its wings, which beat
so fast that they blur in flight. I knew the capitals,
the Kings and Queens, the dates. In class, the white sleeve
of my shirt saluted again and again. Sir!...Correct.
Later, I whooped at the side of my bike, a cowboy,
mounted it running in one jump. I sped down Dyke Hill,
no hands, famous, learning, dominus domine dominum.

Dave Dee Dozy...Try me. Come on. My mother kept my mascot Gonk
on the TV set for a year. And the photograph. I look
so brainy you'd think I'd just had a bath. The blazer.
The badge. The tie. The first chord of A Hard Day's Night
loud on my head. I ran to the Spinney in my prize shoes,
up Churchill Way, up Nelson Drive, over pink pavements
that girls chalked on, in a blue evening; and I stamped
the pawprints of badgers and skunks in the mud. My country.

I want it back. The captain. The one with all the answers. Bzz.
My name was in red on Lucille Green's jotter. I smiled
as wide as a child who went missing on the way home
from school. The keeny. I say to my stale wife
Six hits by Dusty Springfield. I say to my boss A pint!
How can we know the dancer from the dance? Nobody.
My thick kids wince. Name the Prime Minister of Rhodesia.
My country. How many florins in a pound?


Here are some notes on the Duffy text: [tinyurl.com]

Yeats is well known for starting out with some single subject and having the poem go off in other directions, seemingly of its own accord. Usually meaning it has Gonne off rather than gone off, right. I remember reading 'somewhere' that Yeats had a note to himself in a diary or notebook that he intended someday to write a poem about the educational system. In the schoolchildren one, he starts out that way, then gets hijacked into imagining Maud as a child, and diverts from there.

As far as interpreting the Captain one, she seems to merely be nostalgic for earlier times, when life was more fun. Within that context, the Yeats reference could simply be another in the listing of things remembered from 1964. I would need a compelling reason to think there is a deeper meaning and I don't (on first reading at least) see one yet.

It sounds like the author is watching a TV quiz show such as Jeapordy or Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

pam

Pam, Top of the Form was an inter-school radio (later TV) quiz programme. Teams of four students (~14 or 15 years old) competed against each other answering general knowledge questions. I don't think today's students have as wide a knowledge of art, literature and the world as they had then.

Linda,

Thanks- it felt like a quiz show. I would say that the issue then is not really in the line 'how can we know the dancer....' but in the fact that the narrator had this early success and rewards for knowledge- the mother is proud, pictures are taken, etc, but as an adult- no one valuesthis knowledge. Stale wife, thick kids, the boss, no one cares.

pa