The floors are slippery with blood

"The floors are slippery with blood." These are the words that begin Edith Sitwell's poem “The Dancers: During a Great Battle, 1916.” The best-known WWI poems are written by “trench poets,” the term given to soldiers on the Western Front who wrote about the experience of war (such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon).  Not many know Sitwell’s poem: she was a woman whose brother Osbert (also a poet) fought in the trenches of France, and through him, she met and became friends with Sassoon.  After the war, Edith Sitwell remarked that the poetry of the war should be left to the men who fought there.  Women's experience of the war was marginalized even by women themselves, feeling they had not earned the right to speak.  

The Great Battle she is writing of is most likely the battle of the Somme, and Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory) states that the artillery fire prior to the first day of the battle could be heard in England, rattling windows (68). 

The Dancers
During a Great Battle, 1916

The floors are slippery with blood:

The world gyrates too.  God is good

That while His wind blows out the light

For those who die hourly for us –

We can still dance, each night.

The music has grown numb with death –

But we will suck their dying breath,

The whispered name they breathed to chance,

To swell our music, make it loud

That we may dance—,  may dance. 

We are the dull blind carrion-fly

That dance and batten.  Though God die

Mad from the horror of the light—

The light is mad, too, flecked with blood,—

We dance, we dance, each night. 
       —Edith Sitwell

The scene seems to depict a society party, grotesquely out-of-touch with the sufferings of the soldiers. Sassoon wrote, “The man who really endured the War at its worst was everlastingly differentiated from everyone except his fellow soldiers” (Fussell 90).  Or perhaps the dancers are closer to the front, just behind the lines in a staging town such as Poperinghe, where soldiers and nurses, ambulance drivers and VADs frenetically sought rest and diversion from the war? 

Otto Dix, "Dance of Death"

The repetition of the phrase “we dance,” is chanted like a charm to stave off the horrors of the war.  Dancing itself seems an act of forgetting and pretending that life continues as normal, despite the world gyrating (the earth shook for miles during heavy shelling) and the blood that is everywhere, on the floors, and in the very light.   

The speaker names herself as separate from those who die, yet she is not distant:  she is the carrion-fly that crawls over corpses, dancing as she battens or prepares for the upcoming crisis by strengthening and fastening herself to the dance.  In fact, she names herself only as one who dances.  Whether the dance described is the slow spin of a waltz or a metaphorical account of the dizzying attempt to cope with the war, the poem gives voice to an aching and terrible beauty.