Nobody wanders through a department store thinking about armor, but the speaker of Mary F. C. Pratt's poem does, and the result is an argument disguised as a string of jokes. The title promises questions, and the poem opens with one: why would a grown woman dress "like the Black Knight / in armor and a feathered helm"? The gowns on display become battle gear, and the verbs make the point bluntly. "Squeaking, clomping" are noisy, graceless sounds, and the ballroom turns into "a battlefield." Then the image slides from land to sea. A black-scaled mermaid has a "fishbody and no feet," and can only manage "slithering, flopping." The question "How can a mermaid dance?" is funny, but it also gives the poem's first real clue. Each gown is built to look beautiful while stopping its wearer from doing the very thing it was bought for.
The next stanza turns on a single word, "Encumbrance." It is short, almost weary, and the speaker has switched from "a grown woman" to "we," so she now counts herself among those being questioned. Her list of what we already carry is deliberately flat: "dishes and calendars, / lovers and babies and all." Calendars sit beside babies, and the casual "and all" suggests how routine these burdens have become. Why, she asks, would we take on more?
The third stanza makes the boldest move. Burkas, veils and "feet broken and bound" are lumped together as "all this stuff of oppression we deplore," and "stuff" is a deliberately dismissive word. Then comes the accusation: "we let them dress us–to dance!" The exclamation mark carries the irony, since dancing is supposed to be the freest thing the body does. The images that follow are darker and stranger: "mummy wrappings / as if we were dead," then "metallic foil / like salmon / ready for the grill." The fish from the mermaid returns here, no longer a fantasy creature but dinner, and the question "Is that what we are?" hangs unanswered. Readers may well push back on comparing a party dress with foot-binding. The poem seems to know it is being provocative, and "we let them" makes the speaker complicit as well as angry.
The fourth stanza explains why the dresses matter. "Our lives are so tight, / squeezed between certainty / and what we think we shall be." "Tight" and "squeezed" describe a life but also a garment, so the clothing metaphor quietly takes over the whole existence. Floors become the poem's recurring ground, first the ballroom, then the "dirty sidewalks, hall carpets, / ... kitchen floors" that we "tread" through ordinary days.
The ending answers the opening. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its lines are uneven and shaped by speech, and they move from the brisk, hard-edged questions of the start to something much softer. The vocabulary changes with them: "soft hangings of silk and foam," "moonlit," "our bare feet free." The reference to "Isadora-style" calls up Isadora Duncan, the dancer associated with barefoot, flowing movement, and "no bones or stays" recalls the stiff structure of corsets. The mood also shifts from questioning to invitation: "Let us dance, at least." The words "at least" and "if only in fantasy" keep the wish modest and honest. The last image is the exact opposite of the ballroom. Our feet are bare, and the floor is now the world itself, "flowerstrewn" and "unpaved," the opposite of the dirty sidewalks and kitchen floors.
The poem is worth reading because it starts as comic shop-window observation and ends as a real question about how much discomfort we accept in the name of beauty. Its humor lets the reader in, and its uncomfortable comparisons keep the reader thinking. It never offers a revolution, only the wish to move freely for one dance.