William Schwenck Gilbert

The Bab Ballads. 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 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!