DANCE OF DEATH • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Dance of death

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/dæns əv dɛθ/ Listen

noun

Dance n.

The leaping, tripping, or measured stepping of one who dances; an amusement, in which the movements of the persons are regulated by art, in figures and in accord with music.

(Mus.) A tune by which dancing is regulated, as the minuet, the waltz, the cotillon, etc. Note: The word dance was used ironically, by the older writers, of many proceedings besides dancing. "Of remedies of love she knew parchance For of that art she couth the olde dance."

Dance of Death (Art), an allegorical representation of the power of death over all, the old, the young, the high, and the low, being led by a dancing skeleton.

Morris dance. See Morris.

To lead one a dance, to cause one to go through a series of movements or experiences as if guided by a partner in a dance not understood.

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Etymology of 'Dance of death'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Dance of death" Quotes from Famous Books

... Dance of Death! All that go to and fro must look upon it, Mindful of what they shall be, while beneath, Among the wooden piles, the turbulent river Rushes, impetuous as the river of life, With dimpling eddies, ever green and bright, Save where the shadow of ...

— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... their efforts, on the wind that swept in gusts out of the west. On the lawn at Jordan's Journey the fallen leaves were dancing madly like a carnival in rough carousal. Watching them it was easy to imagine that they found some frenzied joy in this dance of death—the end to which they had moved from the young green of the bud through the opulent abundance of the summer. The air was alive with their sighing. They rustled softly under foot as Abel walked up the drive, and then, whipped by a strong gust, fled in ...

— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... banks, a sound rising from the deck of the vessel, a multitude of little taps, rhythmical, muffled, soft as though a corps of clog-dancers were dancing a lively jig in rubber-soled shoes. It is the dance of death of the hapless mackerel. All about the deck they flap and beat their little lives away. Scales fly in every direction, and the rigging, almost to the ...

— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... and paralyses their action. To the sombre imagination of an exhausted race the generations of mankind were like bands of victims dragged one after another to the slaughter-house; in Palladas and his contemporaries the medieval dance of death is begun.[39] The great and simple view of death is wholly broken up, with the usual loss and gain that comes of analysis. On the one hand is developed this tremulous and cowardly shrinking from the law of nature. But on the other there arises in compensation the view of death as final peace, ...

— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... can tell you the direction of the vortices of which you are composed, for a time, while they are on their way to join other vortices in the dance of death. The vortices do nothing but dance, spin and whirl for ever through life, the farce; through death, the tragedy and through all the eternity of the epilogue. What do ...

— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford