"Allegro" is a musical direction meaning fast and lively, and the poem starts at that tempo: "Here is a call to bear arms, a freedom / to rage." The credit line names Tchaikovsky as composer and Isadora Duncan as choreographer, and what follows is a dance seen from the audience. Three women in orange veils are on stage, two young and one old. Mary F. C. Pratt turns this scene into an argument about what freedom really is, and she keeps the answer for the final line.
The opening quatrain is loud and physical. A pun runs through it: the "call to bear arms" returns as "bare feet" and "bare floor." A military phrase is stripped down to its sound and given to dancers, so that raised arms and slamming fists become a kind of battle without an enemy. The rhythm makes you stamp along. Try reading "slam their fists in the air, pound their bare feet" without hitting nearly every word. The ponytails "lash wild," a verb that belongs to whips and storms, and the glossy, bright details (orange veils, shining hair) make the stage feel hot with energy.
The two young dancers get the most vivid phrase in the poem: "sharp soft animals so sure of their youth." The oxymoron catches how young bodies can be fierce and tender at once, and "animals" suggests instinct without reflection. They are "ready to leap somewhere else, to prance / off the stage, searching for another truth." Here the poem's key word starts to build. "Else" appears in "somewhere else" and "another truth," and it defines the young dancers' idea of freedom as escape, with the real thing always waiting in the next place.
The turn comes with "The one old dancer in between." She stands between the two young women on the stage, and she also seems to stand between two views of life. Pratt breaks the line after "brave," so that "body" arrives a beat late, as if we had to look twice at it. The image "arched blue-rooted feet" is the poem's finest. The blue is surely the veins of an older body, and "rooted" sets her against the prancing animals. Where they want to leap away, she is planted like a tree. Her power lies in small things, "every line / and finger-flick," and "line" can mean the shape of a body or the line of a poem. The verb that matters is "holds." The young dancers pull toward the exits, and she keeps "us all here, alive / in this hard world, this changing flesh, this time." The repeated "this" points at things close at hand, answering the "Here" that opened the poem and pulling the audience into the same present as the dancer.
The form supports the argument. This is a sonnet, with a final couplet in the English style, but the rhyme loosens and tightens as the poem goes on. In the first two quatrains only the even lines rhyme ("veils" / "tails," "youth" / "truth"), so the odd lines run free, like the dancers. In the third quatrain the rhyme becomes an alternating pattern: "brave" with "alive," and "line" with the near-rhyme "time." The couplet is a full, firm rhyme: "free" and "be." The metre follows suit. The early lines are knocked about by heavy stresses, but the last two settle into smooth iambic pentameter: "She knows the discipline of being free." The poem's structure carries out the claim its final sentence makes, that freedom depends on discipline.
That last line, "She comprehends: there's nowhere else to be," answers the young dancers directly. "Nowhere else" cancels their "somewhere else," and the colon makes it sound like a lesson learned. Freedom here is the full use of the one body and the one moment you have, and the old dancer shows this by staying in the moment and giving it everything.
What makes the poem worth reading is its choice of hero. A cult of youth would put the leaping dancers at the centre, but Pratt gives the final authority to the performer with visible veins and a changing body. The couplet states its conclusion more plainly than the earlier images do, and some readers may find it a little tidy. Even so, the poem leaves us with a good question for any audience: do we expect truth to be somewhere else, or are we willing to be where we are?