Читать книгу The Bab Ballads, with Which Are Included Songs of a Savoyard - W. S. Gilbert - Страница 18

Table of Contents

Haunted? Ay, in a social way,

By a body of ghosts in a dread array:

But no conventional spectres they—

Appalling, grim, and tricky;

I quail at mine as I'd never quail

At a fine traditional spectre pale,

With a turnip head and a ghostly wail,

And a splash of blood on the dicky!

Mine are horrible social ghosts,

Speeches and women and guests and hosts,

Weddings and morning calls and toasts,

In every bad variety:

Ghosts that hover about the grave

Of all that's manly, free, and brave:

You'll find their names on the architrave

Of that charnel-house, Society.

Black Monday—black as its schoolroom ink—

With its dismal boys that snivel and think

Of nauseous messes to eat and drink,

And a frozen tank to wash in.

That was the first that brought me grief

And made me weep, till I sought relief

In an emblematical handkerchief,

To choke such baby bosh in.

First and worst in the grim array—

Ghosts of ghosts that have gone their way,

Which I wouldn't revive for a single day

For all the wealth of Plutus—

Are the horrible ghosts that schooldays scared

If the classical ghost that Brutus dared

Was the ghost of his "Cæsar" unprepared,

I'm sure I pity Brutus.

I pass to critical seventeen:

The ghost of that terrible wedding scene,

When an elderly colonel stole my queen,

And woke my dream of heaven:

No school-girl decked in her nursery curls

Was my gushing innocent queen of pearls;

If she wasn't a girl of a thousand girls.

She was one of forty-seven!

I see the ghost of my first cigar—

Of the thence-arising family jar—

Of my maiden brief (I was at the Bar),

When I called the judge "Your wushup"!

Of reckless days and reckless nights,

With wrenched-off knockers, extinguished lights,

Unholy songs, and tipsy fights,

Which I strove in vain to hush up.

Ghosts of fraudulent joint-stock banks,

Ghosts of copy, "declined with thanks,"

Of novels returned in endless ranks,

And thousands more, I suffer.

The only line to fitly grace

My humble tomb, when I've run my race,

Is "Reader, this is the resting-place

Of an unsuccessful duffer."

I've fought them all, these ghosts of mine,

But the weapons I've used are sighs and brine,

And now that I'm nearly forty-nine,

Old age is my only bogy;

For my hair is thinning away at the crown,

And the silver fights with the worn-out brown;

And a general verdict sets me down

As an irreclaimable fogy.