Le Mardi Gras.
HE Feast of Folly is spread,
Let us eat and drink and be merry;
While the fountains are running red
With the juice of the glorious berry.
Let us carry the forts of Joy
With a series of madcap dashes,
Ere the Feast of Flesh, my boy,
Gives way to the Fast of Ashes.
We have but a breath of life,
A whiff off the world’s wide pleasure;
A year of its strain and strife,
For a day of its dancing measure.
So, hey for the fatted calf,
While the carnival music crashes!
At the Feast of Flesh we’ll laugh,
Ere we weep at the Fast of Ashes.
O, sage with the grim gray face,
With our quips is there cause to quarrel?
We know ere we run our race
We shall master the Mardi’s moral.
We shall be as the monks who scourge
Their skins with a hundred lashes:
Youth’s Feast of the Flesh we must purge
With our manhood’s Fast of Ashes.
Two Sundays.
HE bigot, with his narrow mind,
Can ill in every pleasure find;
He makes his God a god of gloom,
The pulsing world a living tomb,
A curse in every blessing sees,
And, thinking Heaven to appease,
He cuts—Religion is his knife—
The blossom from the Tree of Life.
From fogs, that gave that bigot birth,
Far off, in many a land of mirth
Hearts full of faith in God above
Look on Him as a God of Love—
A God who bids His children play,
And smiles to see His loved ones gay:
As earthly fathers smile to see
Their children sing and dance with glee.
Oh, British Sabbath, bigot bred,
Our youth’s despair, our childhood’s dread!
God does not scowl in solemn state
Behind a gloomy prison gate;
He smiles enthroned in sunny skies,
Where only joyous songs arise.
To make God’s day, then, ’twere as well,
Seem more like heaven and less like hell.