D. H. Lawrence wrote “Tarantella” in the early twentieth century, at a time when he was increasingly suspicious of the modern mind’s habit of explaining life instead of living it. Lawrence knew the Mediterranean coast from his Italian travels, and the poem’s white sea-stone, glittering shingle and moonlit water are not decorative background; they are the world the speaker wants to enter. The tarantella was an Italian folk dance once thought to cure the bite of a spider through frantic movement. Here the dance becomes a cure for a different kind of poison: the “world’s old wisdom” of the sad, earnest man who sits apart.
The poem stages a clear opposition between two ways of being. The “earnest man” is motionless, ghostly, a “shade by the flood,” while the speaker dances on the rocks and sends mockery across the waves’ bright shoulders. He has none of the night in his soul, none of the sea’s tune, and can only bleat the old wisdom. The word “bleat” is deliberately reductive: wisdom that is not connected to the body becomes an animal noise, thin and repetitive. By contrast, the speaker feels the moon on her breast, the air on her limbs, the foam on her feet. The central idea is not simply that nature is lovely. It is that the conscious, moral, “earnest” self is a kind of prison, and that the soul may need to be lost rather than saved. The speaker longs to be “soulless,” to touch the sea in a moment of “fiery coldness” and disappear into a “lost soul’s bliss.”
Lawrence constructs the poem as a dance of uneven lines and slant rhymes. Each stanza has six lines, but the rhymes surface and recede rather than locking into neat couplets: “stone” finds “alone,” “moon” finds “croon,” “boulders” finds “shoulders.” Short lines such as “What can I do but dance alone” give way to long, breathless ones built on the word “and”: “the moon on my breast and the air on my limbs and the foam on my feet.” That repeated connective keeps the sentence moving the way the tarantella keeps the body moving, without pause. The sea is personified as “suave” and chuckling, the moon smiles with significance, the waves have shoulders. All this vividness belongs to the natural world, while the man remains a shade. In the final stanza the speaker’s desire turns toward a “wild sea-fellow,” a “soulless neckar” with “winking seas in his eyes” and “falling waves in his arms.” The water spirit is not a tame fantasy; he offers the “lost soul’s kiss,” an embrace that would undo the separate self.
What makes the poem significant is its reversal of ordinary values. Religious and moral language usually asks for the soul to be kept safe; Lawrence asks for it to be lost. The “world’s old wisdom” is not an achievement but an isolation. The body, the sea, the moon, the dance—these are not lower than the mind; they are more alive. Lawrence does not merely state this idea. He makes the rhythm itself feel like the tarantella, so the reader can feel the pull between sitting still in wisdom and dancing oneself out of a separate identity. For a school audience, the poem is an invitation and a provocation: maybe what we call wisdom is sometimes a lonely bleat, and maybe becoming “soulless” is less an emptiness than a fiercer way of belonging to the living world.