Vaudeville Dancer
Vaudeville Dancer - meaning Summary
Rise from Small-town Past
The poem addresses Elsie Flimmerwon, contrasting her modest childhood with sudden success as a vaudeville jazz performer. Sandburg frames a personal, nostalgic memory of her mother and father’s illness against the spectacle of an electric marquee and cheering crowds. The piece highlights transformation and the uneasy distance between private past and public fame, suggesting both triumph and a subtle loss of innocence as the streets that once sheltered her now read her name.
Read Complete AnalysesELSIE FLIMMERWON, you got a job now with a jazz outfit in vaudeville. The houses go wild when you finish the act shimmying a fast shimmy to The Livery Stable Blues. It is long ago, Elsie Flimmerwon, I saw your mother over a washtub in a grape arbor when your father came with the locomotor ataxia shuffle. It is long ago, Elsie, and now they spell your name with an electric sign. Then you were a little thing in checked gingham and your mother wiped your nose and said: You little fool, keep off the streets. Now you are a big girl at last and streetfuls of people read your name and a line of people shaped like a letter S stand at the box office hoping to see you shimmy.
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