The Sentiment, Mood, and Philosophy of “the Best Slow Dancer”

Feelings can twist reality in the most peculiar ways. Emotions push the mind to the most stunning conclusions, and stir within the soul the strangest storms. In fact, senses reach their peak in David Wagoner’s poetic work “The Best Slow Dancer”.   In the poem, Wagoner brings out the height of sentiment through the eyes of a teenage boy at a school dance, who overcomes the teenage social hierarchy and his own fear to share in the longed-for dance with one special girl. All the while Wagoner takes his readers into depths of wafting dreaminess, romance, and intimacy they are projected through an unbroken flow of words uninterrupted by punctuation, rhythm, or strict lines.

“The Best Slow Dancer” portrays the mental state of a boy as he experiences a dance. It is a short dance, but one that seems to him prolonged for an eternity, the “three-second rule forever/ suspended”. The feelings that go through the youth’s soul range from extreme delight to just as extreme tension, and the reader may see them all exhibited in the lines of the poem. His surety when with the girl in his embrace is seen when his “countless feet light-footed sure to move as they wished wherever [they] might stagger without her”, but then he “tried…to tell her [he wasn’t] the worst one”, the worst of the boys, the one that she would not be seen dead with—which implies that he is fearful of the fact that she might reject him, “not waving a sister somebody else’s partner”. The full textual image demonstrates that the boy is with all his heart trying to impress the girl, and gets the dance with her against all odds of popularity and such, and then he treasures the experience, as he says to himself “remember” at the end.

All throughout “The Best Slow Dancer”, the key ingredient to the image within the reader’s mind is the mood set by the poem. The mood is mystical, quixotic, intimate, and continual. This state is accomplished by three techniques—poetic devices, turns of phrase, and...