Classic Poem

From Woolwich and Brentford and Stamford Hill, from Richmond in to the Strand,
O the Cockney soul is a silent soul—as it is in every land!
But out on the sand with a broken band it's sarcasm spurs them through;
And, with never a laugh, a gale and a half, 'tis the Cockney cheers the crew.

O send them a tune from the music-halls to march home from the distant sky!
O give them a deep-sea chanty now—and a star to steer them by!

Now this a song of the great untrained, a song of the unprepared,
Who had never the brains to plead unfit, or think of the things they dared;
Of the grocer-souled and the draper-souled, and the clerks of the four o'clock,
Who stood for Empire and died for home in the Nineteen-Fourteen shock.

O this is a paean of the pork-butcher, back from it, maimed and blind,
To a little old shop in Grey's Inn Road and a tiny parlour behind;
And the bedroom above, where the wife and he go silently mourning yet
For a son-in-law who shall never come back—and a dead son's room “To Let”.

(But they have a boy “in the fried fish line”, in a shop across the “wye”,
Who will take them “aht” and “abaht” to-night and cheer their old eyes dry.)

And this is a song of the draper's clerk (what have you all to say?)—
Who wore a top-hat and a walking-coat to the city every day—
He wears no flesh on his broken bones that lie in the shell-churned loam;
For he went over the top and struck with his cheating yard-wand—home.

(O touch your hat to the tailor-made before you are aware,
And lilt us a lay of Bank-holiday and the Lights of Leicester Square!)

Hats off to the Lady Dowager in her home in Russell Square!
Like the pork-butcher and his missus, they are silently mourning there;
For one who lay ahead of the rest in the slush 'neath a darkening sky,
With the blood of a hundred earls congealed and his eye-glass to his eye.

(He gave me a cheque in an envelope on a distant gloomy day;
He gave me his hand at the mansion door and he said: “Good-luck! Good-bai!”)