Six lines, three couplets, no punctuation and not a single capital letter. Dave Bonta packs a surprising amount into that space, and the title is where the poem starts. Tarantism is the name of an old folk illness, linked especially with southern Italy, in which people were thought to be poisoned by a spider's bite and cured only by frenzied music and dancing. Before the first line, then, we already have a picture of dance as something forced on the body by terror, a symptom as much as a celebration.
The opening couplet reads like a diagnosis: "dancing out of fear / is a great disorder." The flat, aphoristic tone sounds clinical, as if a doctor were writing in a case file. But "great disorder" is slippery. It can mean a serious illness, a deep lack of order, or something large and almost magnificent. The repeated *d* sounds in "dancing" and "disorder" link the activity to its label, as though the poem were saying that the dance and the disorder are one and the same.
Then the poem abruptly turns away from argument: "water going out with the tide / green and cold as old meat." Nothing in the first stanza prepares us for this. The tide is withdrawing, and what it reveals is not romantic but faintly nauseating. The simile compares the sea to spoiled flesh, and that shift does a lot of work. The natural world becomes a body, and the body is already starting to rot. "Going out" suggests something draining away, whether life, certainty or protection. The sound is worth noticing too: "cold" and "old" rhyme with each other inside the line, so the phrase closes with a dull, heavy chime that fits its subject. The hard *g* and *c* sounds of "going," "green" and "cold" make the image feel chilly and clenched.
The final couplet changes both pronoun and tense. The general "dancing... is" becomes a personal, communal past: "we danced and broke / to be less like God." The "we" makes the poem sound like a confession, or a shared memory. The verb "broke" is the poem's hinge. It can mean that the dancers broke down, broke their own bodies, or broke some rule or order. It also quietly echoes the sea, since waves break, and so the dance and the tide briefly belong to the same movement. The word is left without an object, so we have to decide what was broken.
The last line is the most puzzling and the most interesting: "to be less like God." Why would anyone want that? One reading is that God stands for what never breaks: perfect, unchanging, unafraid. Dancing in fear, and cracking under it, would then be a way of insisting on being mortal. Another reading is darker. Perhaps the speakers wanted to escape some burden of godlikeness, such as pride or control, and found that breaking was the only way out. The poem does not choose between these. The earlier image of meat makes either reading feel physical rather than abstract, because to be less like God is to be more like flesh.
In form, Bonta uses free verse with no rhyme at the ends of lines. The lines are short and nearly even, so each couplet feels like a separate breath. The lack of punctuation lets phrases slide into one another, so "dancing out of fear" can seem to be a whole sentence before "is a great disorder" arrives. The poem moves from idea to image to action, and the repeated word "danced" echoes "dancing" to bring the ending back to the beginning, though by then the dance has cost something.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses the easy version of its subject. It would be simple to treat dancing as joy or release, but Bonta insists on the fear underneath and on what the dancers lose. In six lines it asks whether being broken might be a way of becoming fully human, and it leaves that question as unsettled as the tide.