<h2><SPAN name="page14"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>ONLY A DANCING GIRL</h2>
<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Only</span> a dancing
girl,<br/>
With an unromantic style,<br/>
With borrowed colour and curl,<br/>
With fixed mechanical smile,<br/>
With many a hackneyed wile,<br/>
With ungrammatical lips,<br/>
And corns that mar her trips.</p>
<p class="poetry">Hung from the “flies” in air,<br/>
She acts a palpable lie,<br/>
She’s as little a fairy there<br/>
As unpoetical I!<br/>
I hear you asking, Why—<br/>
Why in the world I sing<br/>
This tawdry, tinselled thing?</p>
<p class="poetry">No airy fairy she,<br/>
As she hangs in arsenic green<br/>
From a highly impossible tree<br/>
In a highly impossible scene<br/>
(Herself not over-clean).<br/>
For fays don’t suffer, I’m told,<br/>
From bunions, coughs, or cold.</p>
<p class="poetry">And stately dames that bring<br/>
Their daughters there to see,<br/>
Pronounce the “dancing thing”<br/>
No better than she should be,<br/>
With her skirt at her shameful knee,<br/>
And her painted, tainted phiz:<br/>
Ah, matron, which of us is?</p>
<p class="poetry">(And, in sooth, it oft occurs<br/>
That while these matrons sigh,<br/>
Their dresses are lower than hers,<br/>
And sometimes half as high;<br/>
And their hair is hair they buy,<br/>
And they use their glasses, too,<br/>
In a way she’d blush to do.)</p>
<p class="poetry">But change her gold and green<br/>
For a coarse merino gown,<br/>
And see her upon the scene<br/>
Of her home, when coaxing down<br/>
Her drunken father’s frown,<br/>
In his squalid cheerless den:<br/>
She’s a fairy truly, then!</p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />
1 of 2
2 of 2
Previous
Next
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.