A Street Fight
SIR, we approve your curling lip and nose
At this vile sight.
These men, these women are 'brute beasts'? — Who knows,
Sir, but that you are right?
Panders and harlots, rogues and thieves and worse,
We are a crew
Whose pitiful plunder's honoured in the purse
Of gentlemen (like you),
Whom holy Competition's taught (like us)
'What's thine is mine!' —
How we must love you who have made us thus,
You may perhaps divine!
In The Street
Lord Shaftesbury
YOU have done well, we say it. You are dead,
And, of the man that with the right hand takes
Less than the left hand gives, let it be said
He has done something for our wretched sakes.
For those to whom you gave their daily bread
Rancid with God-loathed 'charity,' their drink
Putrid with man-loathed 'sin,' we bow our head
Grateful, as the great hearse goes by, and think.
Yes, you have fed the flesh and starved the soul
Of thousands of us; you have taught too well
The Rich are little gods beyond control,
Save of your big God of the heaven and hell.
We thank you. This was pretty once, and right.
Now it wears rather thin. My lord, good night!
In Trafalgar Square
THE stars shone faint through the smoky blue;
The church-bells were ringing;
Three girls, arms laced, were passing through,
Tramping and singing.
Their heads were bare: their short skirts swung
As they went along;
Their scarf-covered breasts heaved up, as they sung
Their defiant Song.
It was not too clean, their feminine lay,
But it thrilled me quite
With its challenge to taskmaster villainous day
And infamous night,
With its threat to the robber Rich, the Proud,
The respectable Free.
And I laughed and shouted to them aloud,
And they shouted to me!
'Girls, that's the shout, the shout we shall utter
When, with rifles and spades,
We stand, with the old Red Flag aflutter,
On the barricades!'
