A particular young girl at ballet class

adopts the classic pose she has been trained in,

head up, shoulders back, arms down behind her,

her weight on her left foot, the right foot forward,

sideways, so far sideways that it’s a statement,

confident, assured: the fourth position.

This she can do. Her raised face catches the light

and shows her as an individual,

untypical, with character, fully human.

She knows she’s being looked at, that’s what dancing

is for, to be seen, first by the teacher,

till she has corrected every angle

of the stance and every practised movement,

then by an audience beyond the footlights.

 

Like her fellow dancers she’s accustomed

to the man who hangs round making sketches.

He’s as familiar as the smell of sweat

in the changing rooms, and the pull of muscles,

the rapid breath and heartbeat, aching toes.

She is unselfconscious and assured, inside

a bubble of precocious expertise.

She doesn’t see how vulnerable she is,

not fully grown, trusting the apparatus

of a world which has brought her to this point.

Her raised face has the undefensiveness

of an infant’s, lifted for a goodnight kiss.

 

Her living flesh is mimicked now in metal.

Between the bronze buttons of her bodice

and her bronze legs and pumps, her lacy tutu,

despite the glass case which must help preserve it,

has turned from cream to sepia with the years.

The blurred figures of museum-goers

behind her show that the photographer

chose a long exposure for this picture.

A second is an aeon for a shutter,

enough for three beats of a dancer’s heart.

The girl who stands appealingly before us –

or the one who modelled for the artist,

and was transformed into this sculpted image –

disappeared, may have come to a bad end,

like one of her sisters. Another did well,

had a career, survived the two world wars.

Whatever happened, she can’t still be living.

 

She was and is unique, but her likeness

is archetypal, anonymous, she stands

for all young dancers everywhere, then and now,

for a whole moment in a certain culture,

for the enterprise of human history,

its tension between nature and transcendence.

What has the upper hand, our transience

or the semi-permanence of sculpture?

Which mocks which now, bronze or faded tutu,

the poise and self-assurance of the dancer,

the lifted face full of dedication,

or the airlessness of the display case

and the figures, at ease in shorts and trainers,

thankfully anonymised by blurring,

of the visitors moving between paintings

and rooms, and out into the daylight?

John Freeman’s poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. His most recent full collection is Plato’s Peach (Worple Press). His most recent book is a collaboration with photographer Chris Humphrey, Visions of Llandaff. Born in Essex, he grew up in South London and spent three years in Yorkshire before moving to Wales, where he taught for many years at Cardiff University. He lives in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Main photo by Peter Sedgwick.