| O CITY that is not a city, unworthy the prefix Atlantic, | |
| Forlornest of watering-places, and thoroughly Philadelphian! | |
| In thy despite I sing, with a bitter and deep detestation— | |
| A detestation born of a direful and dinnerless evening, | |
| Spent in thy precincts unhallowed—an evening I trust may recur not. | 5 |
| Never till then did I know what was meant by the word god-forsaken: | |
| Thou its betokening hast taught me, being the chiefest example. | |
| Thou art the scorned of the gods; thy sand from their sandals is shaken; | |
| Thee have they left in their wrath to thy uninteresting extensiveness, | |
| Barren and bleak and big; a wild aggregation of barracks, | 10 |
| Miscalled hotels, and of dovecotes denominate cottages; | |
| A confusion of ugly girls, of sand, and of health-bearing breezes, | |
| With one unending plank-walk for a true Philadelphia "attraction." | |
| City ambitiously named, why, with inducements delusive, | |
| Is the un-Philadelphian stranger lured to thy desert pretentious? | 15 |
| 'T is not alone that thy avenues, broad and unpaved and unending, | |
| Re-echo yet with the obsolete music of "Pinafore," | |
| Whistled in various keys by the rather too numerous negro; | |
| 'T is not alone that Propriety—Propriety too Philadelphian— | |
| Over thee stretches an ægis of wholly superfluous virtue; | 20 |
| That thou art utterly good; hast no single vice to redeem thee; | |
| 'T is not alone that thou art provincial in all things, and petty; | |
| And that the dullness of death is gay, compared to thy dullness— | |
| 'T is not alone for these things that my curse is to rest upon thee: | |
| But for a sin that crowns thee with perfect and eminent badness; | 25 |
| Sets thee alone in thy shame, the unworthiest town on the sea-coast: | |
| This: that thou dinest at Noon, and then in a manner barbarian, | |
| Soupless and wineless and coffeeless, untimely and wholly indecent— | |
| As is the custom, I learn, in Philadelphia proper. | |
| I rose and I fled from thy Supper; I said: "I will get me a Dinner!" | 30 |
| Vainly I wandered thy streets: thy eating-places ungodly | |
| Knew not the holiness of Dinner; in all that evening I dined not; | |
| But in a strange low lair, infested of native mechanics, | |
| Bolted a fried beefsteak for the physical need of my stomach. | |
| And for them that have fried that steak, in Aides' lowest back-kitchen | 35 |
| May they eternally broil, by way of a warning to others. | |
| During my wanderings, I met, and hailed with delight one Italian, | |
| A man with a name from "Pasquale"—the chap sung by Tagliapietra— | |
| He knew what it was to dine; he comprehended my yearnings; | |
| But the spell was also on him; the somnolent spell Philadelphian; | 40 |
| And his hostelry would not be open till Saturday next; and I cursed him. | |
| Now this is not too much to ask, God knows, that a mortal should want a | |
| Pint of Bordeaux to his dinner, and a small cigarette for a climax: | |
| But, these things being denied him, where then is your Civilization? | |
| O Coney Island! of old I have reviled and blasphemed thee, | 45 |
| For that thou dowsest thy glim at an hour that is un-metropolitan; | |
| That thy frequenters' feet turn townwards ere striketh eleven, | |
| When the returning cars are filled with young men and maidens, | |
| Most of the maidens asleep on the young men's cindery shoulders— | |
| Yea, but I spake as a fool, insensate, disgruntled, ungrateful: | 50 |
| Thee will I worship henceforth in appreciative humility: | |
| Luxurious and splendid and urban, glorious and gaslit and gracious, | |
| Gathering from every land thy gay and ephemeral tenantry, | |
| From the Greek who hails thee, "Thalatta!" to the rustic who murmurs, "My Golly!" | |
| From the Bowery youth who requests his sweetheart to "look at them billers!" | 55 |
| To the Gaul whom thy laughing waves almost persuade to immersion: | |
| O Coney Island, thou art the weary citizen's heaven— | |
| A heaven to dine, not die in, joyful and restful and clamful, | |
| Better one hour of thee than an age of Atlantic City! | |
