“Tarantella” might be Hilaire Belloc’s finest poem. It’s certainly one of my favourites, which is why I’ve selected it for this week’s “Poem of the Week” podcast in the Inner Sanctum of my website, in which I read it and discuss it. 
I spent some time searching for readings of the poem on YouTube and was struck by how the poem is often rendered as a work beset by melancholy from its beginning, which is not the way that I read it in my podcast, nor the way I believe it should be read. The point of this poem is conveyed in its turn from merriment to melancholy, which is the point at which the mood and the metre changes. The correct way of reading it is suggested by the way in which Belloc sings it in the last of the links below. 
The first link is to the text, which should be read before the five interpretations of it are viewed: 
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Belloc-Hilaire_Tarantella.html