Away, Remorse!
Compunction, hence!.
Go, Moral Force!
Go, Penitence!
To Virtue's plea
A long farewell —
Propriety,
I ring your knell!
Come, guiltiness of deadliest hue!
Come, desperate deeds of derring-do!
For thirty-five years I've been sober and wary —
My favourite tipple came straight from a dairy.
I kept guinea-pigs and a Belgian canary —
A squirrel, white mice, and a small black-and-tan.
I played on the flute, and I drank lemon squashes.
I wore chamois leather, thick boots, macintoshes,
And things that will someday be known as galoshes,
The type of a highly respectable man!
For the rest of my life I abandon propriety —
Visit the haunts of Bohemian society,
Waxworks, and other resorts of impiety,
Placed by the moralist under a ban.
My ways will be those of a regular satyr,
At carryings-on I must be a first-rater —
Go night after night to a wicked theater —
It's hard on a highly respectable man!
Well, the man who has spent the first half of his tether,
On all the bad deeds you can bracket together,
Then goes and repents in his cap it's a feather —
Society pets him as much as it can.
It's a comfort to think, if I now go a cropper,
I sha'n't, on the whole, have done more that's improper
Than he who was once an abandoned tip-topper,
But now is a highly respectable man!!