The Feast of Folly is spread,
Let us eat and drink and be merry;
While the fountains are running red
With the juice of the glorious berry.
Let us carry the forts of Joy
With a series of madcap dashes,
Ere the Feast of Flesh, my boy,
Gives way to the Fast of Ashes.
We have but a breath of life,
A whiff off the world’s wide pleasure;
A year of its strain and strife,
For a day of its dancing measure.
So, hey for the fatted calf,
While the carnival music crashes!
At the Feast of Flesh we’ll laugh,
Ere we weep at the Fast of Ashes.
O, sage with the grim gray face,
With our quips is there cause to quarrel?
We know ere we run our race
We shall master the Mardi’s moral.
We shall be as the monks who scourge
Their skins with a hundred lashes:
Youth’s Feast of the Flesh we must purge
With our manhood’s Fast of Ashes.