Only a Dancing Girl
ONLY a dancing girl,With an unromantic style,With borrowed colour and curl,With fixed mechanical smile,With many a hackneyed wile,With ungrammatical lips,And corns that mar her trips.
Hung from the “flies” in air,She acts a palpable lie,She’s as little a fairy thereAs unpoetical I!I hear you asking, Why—Why in the world I singThis tawdry, tinselled thing?
No airy fairy she,As she hangs in arsenic greenFrom a highly impossible treeIn a highly impossible scene(Herself not over-clean).For fays don’t suffer, I’m told,From bunions, coughs, or cold.
And stately dames that bringTheir daughters there to see,Pronounce the “dancing thing”No better than she should be,With her skirt at her shameful knee,And her painted, tainted phiz:Ah, matron, which of us is?
(And, in sooth, it oft occursThat while these matrons sigh,Their dresses are lower than hers,And sometimes half as high;And their hair is hair they buy,And they use their glasses, too,In a way she’d blush to do.)
But change her gold and greenFor a coarse merino gown,And see her upon the sceneOf her home, when coaxing downHer drunken father’s frown,In his squalid cheerless den:She’s a fairy truly, then!