Slatternly, worn, and faded in part,
Clown of the whole pictorial art,
Your Day was when you flashed on the eye
The folly and farce you glorify.
As to paper and paste and gaudy paint,
Extravagance, lack of all restraint,
Contempt for logic, yet power to thrill—
What a world there is in a circus-bill!
A poem writ with a tawdry pen
To Indulge the wayward whims of men;
A weather-map with a board survey
Of childhood's fairest, happiest day.
How dear to our hearts your cheap romance
Of color, carnival, jest and dance—
Performance continued day and night,
Or as long as your face remained in sight.
And after all, if we failed to see
The actual show, your show was free;
How often we lived it over in brief,
Or invoked your spell to assuage our grief.
As age came on, with more command,
What hopes, what prospects were at hand,
Replete with wonderment and thrills
For all the world like circus-bills.
Till Time's bill-poster, Fortune, hung
New titles upon the boards, and flung
The tatters of tedious, gilded fraud
Upon the earth and the air abroad.
With a bigger date before our eye,
We let the precious weeks slip by,
And only the circus-days loom bright
To mark Life's passing and Time's mad flight.
Yet Life is rich for the hours we wait,
And the things we please to anticipate,
As love is deeper for some regret,
And peace for strife it will never forget.