Purrs and Reprisals

An English visitor’s recent charge that Australian girls have an ungraceful stance would seem to be matched by the American girl’s confession that English female faces which did not remind her of Bill Hart still reminded her of Bill Hart’s horse, and, equally, by the Australian lady traveller’s remark that female shipboard acquaintances from the U.S.A. seemed to be striving audibly for the nasal supremacy of the Pacific.

English girls with horses’ faces,
Yankee girls with voices shrill,
Aussie girls whose stance bears traces
Of ancestral cow-yards still,
Think ye men are such blood-blisters
As to so affront you? How
Can such carping come from sisters
Who should cleave together? Mee-ow!

Shame, ye English-speaking ladies!
Spite informs the hostile mind.
Sharper than the pains of Hades
Are the rancors left behind
When these beings men call gentle
All their finer feelings slough,
Waking passions elemental
In their sisters’ bosoms. Mee-ow!

Not the sun-burned tooth of Britain,
Not the drawl of U.S.A.,
Not the slouch of maidens smitten
With the agricultural sway
Of bucolic great-grandmothers
Could induce such spleen, I trow,
In the courtlier, kindlier brothers
Of these female critics. Mee-ow!

Erring sisters, pray take pattern
By the male; nor yet deride
Stance or slouch that marks the slattern,
Front teeth bravely worn outside,
Nose that functions clarion fashion—
Curb you taunts, ungenerous frau,
Lest the victim, roused to passion,
Leave a deadlier claw-mark. Mee-ow!