Buckdancer’s Choice (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: James Dickey
- First Published: 1965
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Children, Mothers, Parents and children, Music or musicians, Death or dying, Minstrels
The Poem
“Buckdancer’s Choice” is a short poem written in an anapestic meter. The poem’s narrator recalls that during his childhood, he would listen to his invalid mother whistle a song, which he now realizes represented the last assertions of her will and life force as she faced death. To highlight the human refusal to give in to death, the narrator develops an analogy between his mother’s whistling and the dance of the buck-and-wing men who performed in minstrel shows.
The poem begins with the narrator remembering how his bedridden mother would “split”...
[The entire page is 1240 words long]
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