Few poems about a circus manage to be funny, tender and accusing all at once. Peter Viereck's "The Sleepdancers" starts out as a visit to a bear act, with sixteen mangy animals shuffling through a waltz behind bars, and ends as something close to a vow. The speaker, who first admits he would be bitten for joining the dance, finishes by promising to defend whatever is clumsy, ridiculous and hopeful in a world quick to laugh at it.
The first stanza sets the speaker's discomfort. He "tried to look away," but the image has lodged in his memory, and the word "mangy" is deliberately unglamorous. This is no storybook circus. The second stanza then turns on the audience's reaction. The bears' jowls "grin their Indignity," and the capital letter turns a passing detail into a theme. The bears seem to be good sports, smiling like figures in a "comic paper," but the poem insists the smile is a mask. "I wish I really thought they were absurd," the speaker says, and the line works because it admits the easy response, laughter, is the comfortable one. Seeing the bears as ridiculous would let him off the hook.
The poem's boldest move comes in the third stanza, where the speaker swings round to address the crowd as "snout-chained soul of man." The bears are chained, but so are the spectators, who clap with "paws" and make a "rumpus." The audience is "middle-aged and grouchy, gypped of fun," "growlers all, inelegantly pompous." Animal vocabulary has migrated onto the humans, and the insult is also a diagnosis: these people laugh at the bears because they cannot dance themselves. Their pomposity is the real indignity.
The fourth and fifth stanzas lift the poem into fantasy. Do the bears "sleepdance" at night, "just like—you?" The dash makes the question personal. We picture them teetering across the canvas roof of the "carnival-canteen," their bear-hugs flattening "the moon they fly to when they're drowsing." The drunken keeper below knows nothing of this. Here the bears escape the act, which is also what dreams do for us: sleep is the one place where grace is possible. Then comes the sudden drop, "Suppose they crash? Who shrives bears when they're dead?" To shrive is to hear a confession and grant absolution, a priestly word, and it quietly claims the bears deserve a dignity usually reserved for humans.
Formally, the poem is more disciplined than its mood suggests. The first four stanzas are quatrains in iambic pentameter with alternating rhyme (get/forget, bars/bears), though Viereck bends the rhymes playfully, as with "paper" and "caper," or "rumpus" and "pompous," the sort of comic rhyme that mimics the clumsy waltz it describes. Then the pattern loosens. The last stanza breaks the quatrain mould, running on for a line longer than expected, and the closing line stands alone, set apart on its own. The poem's own form seems to stumble and then recover, rather like the creatures it describes.
That last section turns fierce. Opportunistic "cats and curs," which once cringed at the bears, may now "dice to divvy and lug home their fat" once the bears are dead. The speaker will not allow it: "If I'm around, I'll put a stop to that." His gentleness has a protective edge. The resolution, "I'll honor gaucheness anywhere I find it," is the poem's thesis in miniature. Gaucheness, awkwardness and social clumsiness, is usually something to be embarrassed about, and he promises to honor it instead.
The final line, "And the deep sadness of a shaggy hope," carries the whole poem's feeling in a few words. "Shaggy" is physical and almost comic, while "hope" and "sadness" are heavy. The sentence's grammar also does something quiet: it runs on from the previous line, so that the vow to honor gaucheness is completed only at the very end, as if the speaker needed the whole poem to reach that sentence.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses both sentimentality and cynicism. It sympathizes with the bears without pretending they are noble, and it criticizes the crowd without excusing the speaker, who confesses his own wish to find them absurd. It argues, with some wit, that how we treat the awkward and the performing, whether animal or human, says more about us than about them.