Classic Poem

What is that which slinks and sidles in the sunlight and the gloom,
With a hand that pains its features while the other claws a broom?
Dirt and rags and always hunger — ignorance and misery;
With one touch of human kinship: " he was werry kind to me. "
Jennie Lee as " Jo " ! She passes, bowing primly on the stair
In the girlish mid-Victorian dress our mothers used to wear.

Jennie Lee as " Jo " ! She passes, white-haired, from this worldly stage;
G. V. Brooke had gone before her, hard-up in a golden age,
Worshipped on the miners' mountains, worshipped on the diggers' flats,
Borrowing from the Yids and throwing silver to the gutter brats,
Careless as the Land that loved him, gay and clever, free and frank —
Was the shade of Sidney Carton with him when the London sank?

Shades of seasons when the servants of our fathers served us still —
Love and drink and Nellie Denver; good old Jaikes and " Master Will " ;
Shades of Maggie Knight and Deering in the distance glimmering;
Shades of Beck and Big Jack Ryson — Titheradge as the Silver King!
Ah! the all-star days have vanished like a past year's glorious rain —
We, who saw it once, will never see " The Silver King " again!