The Shady Side Poem by Samuel Alfred Beadle

There's something fascinating on life's dark and sombre side,
When the worn and travel-weary seek for rest at even tide;
In the shadows where the fallen come to muse on faded hope,
Expectancies that vanished like to bubbles blown from soap.


If you should reach the shady side of life methinks you'll find,
Some who have found the upper world so heartless and unkind,
And so disposed to torture with the despotisms there
They had to seek the shadows as a refuge from despair.


Take him who grubs for fortune in a systematic way,
Till 'biz' is rich in promise and responsive in its pay,
And faith ascends the zenith lit with hope, his lucky star,
And watch him when the nagger plies her repartees that bar.


Then see him with the languor and forlorn in all his air,
A standing on the curbstone in a semi-vacant stare;
In pendulous vibrations 'twix the club-room and his wife,
This a solace, that a nagger, to his swiftly ebbing life.


The wife is simply nothing if she can't assert her rights;
Cannot attend the socials and the musicals of nights,
And there forget the promise of our sunny years flown long
With the graces of the angels and the eloquence of song.


But the wayward, something wiser than your wife, plays on your whim,
Veneering all your failures with the glow of triumph's glim,
E'er sees in you some greatness, never finds in you a fault,
You're every whit par excellence, though brimming full of malt.


We cannot help but like them if we dared do otherwise,
Their sympathy and fervor would their meaner selves disguise;
So far transcend the nagging of our double-tongued wives,
The nuptials were but prose beside the lyric of our lives.


With naggers, life is painful if they do not roar and snort
With frenzy and with fury, and the trespass of retort;
And club men are so constant in their social thought and air,
You just forget deception is the glory reigning there.


Men know 'tis wrong to wander, that to dissipate is sin,
That the dazzle of the harem is the web the evil spin,
To inveigle and to plunder, and to deprivate and spoil,
But to the flings of nagging wives they make a splendid foil.


You may moralize and blame them, you may put them under ban,
And scourge them out of Eden, from Beersheba unto Dan;
But they'll fly the track at intervals and seek the Shady Side,
Though naggers all were angels and with deities allied.


A lodge within the fastness of the desert waste, or wild,
Is better than the castle hall and palace courts defiled
By wielding of the epigram and reign of repartee,
Where the housewife's pride and glory is to nag and disagree.


Again, take her whose virginhood bloomed on the Sunny Side,
Who had no whim unfavored and no wish not satisfied;
But loved while young, and loving, took the first mad leap and lost.
And see what door will open, and what lord will be her host.


If she, perchance a mother, friend, should visit you today,
Are you not sure you'd drive her and her infant child away;
What matron of the sisterhood of elite folks above
Would comfort give a wanderer from the sunny haunts of love?


Except, perhaps, they might take him whose purse has golden strings;
Or him who has a title to estates and fees and things;
Aye! truly they might lord the man who dragged the maiden down,
And let him take his pick of hearts from daughters of their own.


But she who young in loving took the first mad leap and lost,
Must wander forth hereafter, friend, a vagabond at most,
Unless she seeks the Shady Side, where high-flown hopes are furled,
And take her portion and her chance with us of the Under World.


And let her not be weary, nor in her soul cast down,
We have no social tyrants here who murder with a frown;
But noble men and women, too, with souls like open charts,
Who take one's measure not from gold, but purposes of heart.