Only A Dancing Girl

Only a dancing girl,     With an unromantic style,     With borrowed color 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 there     As unpoetical I!     I hear you asking, Why     Why in the world I sing     This tawdry, tinselled thing?     No airy fairy she,     As she hangs in arsenic green,     From a highly impossible tree,     In 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 bring     Their 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 occurs     That 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 green     For a coarse merino gown,     And see her upon the scene     Of her home, when coaxing down     Her drunken father's frown,     In his squalid, cheerless den:     She's a fairy truly, then!