Mary Make-Believe - Noël Coward

If you’re romantic temperamentally

You must restrain it all you can

If you see life too sentimentally

You’ll never find your man

You’ll build such terribly pedantic dreams

But your romantic scheme may go awry

Your thoughts are such

You claim too much

And love will pass you by

Mary make believe

Dreamed the whole day through

Foolish fancies, love romances

How could they come true

Mary make believe

Sighed a little up her sleeve

Nobody claimed her

They only named her

Mary make believe

She’s just a girl who’s always blowing mental bubbles

Till she’s quite our of breath, quite out of breath

She seems to have the knack of magnifying troubles

Till they crush her to death, crush her to death

She’s just a duffer of the ineffective kind

She’s bound to suffer from her introspective mind

Her indecisions quite prevent her visions coming true

Imagination is a form of flagellation

If a sensitive child lets it run wild

It dims the firmament

Till all the world is permanently blue

She’s simply bound to make a bloomer

Until she’s found her sense of humour

If love should touch her ever

She’ll never, never see it through

Nobody claimed her

They only named her—

Mary make believe

Noel Coward, w.

Orchestra

Dir.

Carroll Gibbons

Recorded 27th April 1928