If
I were to teach Yeats’s
“The
Long-Legged Fly” again, I would pair it with an excerpt from Tim O’Brien’s
The Things They Carried. In the second
stanza of “The Long-Legged Fly” we see Helen of Troy in a private moment,
dancing alone, thinking that no one is looking. In the chapter “Style” in
The
Things They Carried, a young Vietnamese girl dances alone in the ruins
her village.
The Long-Legged Fly
That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practice a tinker shuffle
Picked up on the street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
From "Style" (The Things They Carried)
The girl danced mostly on her toes. She took tiny steps in the dirt in front of her house,
sometimes making a slow twirl, sometimes smiling to herself. "Why's she dancing?"
Azar said, and Henry Dobbins said it didn't matter why, she just was. Later we found her
family in the house. They were dead and badly burned. It wasn't a big family:
an infant and an old woman and a woman whose age was hard to tell. When we dragged
them out, the girl kept dancing. She put the palms of her hands against her ears,
which must've meant something, and she danced sideways for a short while, and then
backwards. She did a graceful movement with her hips. "Well, I don't get it," Azar said.
The smoke from the hootches smelled like straw. It moved in patches across the village
square, not thick anymore, sometimes just faint ripples like fog. There were dead pigs, too.
The girl went up on her toes and made a slow turn and danced through the smoke.
Her face had a dreamy look, quiet and composed. A while later, when we moved
out of the hamlet, she was still dancing. "Probably some weird ritual," Azar said,
but Henry Dobbins looked back and said no, the girl just liked to dance.
