Only 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. <br /> <br />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? <br /> <br />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. <br /> <br />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? <br /> <br />(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.) <br /> <br />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!<br /><br />William Schwenck Gilbert<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/only-a-dancing-girl/
