This paper is an attempt to ‘think with’ Desmond Manderson’s Danse Macabre. To celebrate the creative energies that Danse Macabre liberates, we need to work with the grain of the text; with its images and metaphors, and to follow the circle that it traces from its own beginning to its end; which is not really an end at all, but the evocation of the possibility of “rebirth”, a rhythm, that is in turn linked to the capacity of art to “surprise”- to break the bad repetition of law. Celebrating Danse Macabre is ‘thinking with’ the text—an idea that will be connected to the weak force of ethics---an animus of Manderson’s thought. The ‘with’ takes us to Denise Levertov’s poem A Solitude-- a performance of a mode of poetic thinking that emanates from Manderson’s intellectual sensorium.
