Good-by Now or Pardon My Gauntlet
Good-by Now or Pardon My Gauntlet - meaning Summary
Refinement Satirized Through Contrast
Nash playfully satirizes social refinement by contrasting genteel Janet’s euphemisms, elevated diction, and affected manners with the speaker’s blunt, ordinary behavior. Through a rapid list of verbal and behavioral oppositions—language, reactions, bodily terms, and attitudes toward death and food—the poem exposes pretension and class-conscious affectation. The tone is comic and ironic, reducing Janet’s lofty airs to a series of amusing linguistic and social tics.
Read Complete AnalysesBring down the moon for genteel Janet; She's too refined for this gross planet. She wears garments and you wear clothes, You buy stockings, she purchases hose. She say That is correct, and you say Yes, And she disrobes and you undress. Confronted by a mouse or moose, You turn green, she turns chartroose. Her speech is new-minted, freshly quarried; She has a fore-head, you have a forehead. Nor snake nor slowworm draweth nigh her; You go to bed, she doth retire. To Janet, births are blessed events, And odors that you smell she scents. Replete she feels, when her food is yummy, Not in the stomach but the tummy. If urged some novel step to show, You say Like this, she says Like so. Her dear ones don't die, but pass away; Beneath her formal is lonjeray. Of refinement she's a fount, or fountess, And that is why she's now a countess. She was asking for the little girls' room And a flunky though she said the earl's room.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.