Silhouettes

Chapter 32: THE OLD LABOURER.

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About This Book

A collection of lyric poems offering impressionistic sketches of urban and seaside scenes that linger on mood more than plot. Short pieces move through theatre, cafés, promenades, and nocturnes to explore fleeting sensations of love, memory, and aesthetic perception. Sensuous details—scent, music, and light—are foregrounded, and symbolist-inflected techniques emphasize atmosphere and subjective response rather than narrative development. The arrangement reads as a series of portraits and reveries that shift subtly between observation and delicate psychological insight.

THE OLD LABOURER.

HIS fourscore years have bent a back of oak,
     His earth-brown cheeks are full of hollow pits;
     His gnarled hands wander idly as he sits
Bending above the hearthstone’s feeble smoke.
Threescore and ten slow years he tilled the land;
     He wrung his bread from out the stubborn soil;
     He saw his masters flourish through his toil;
He held their substance in his horny hand.

Now he is old: he asks for daily bread:
     He who has sowed the bread he may not taste
          Begs for the crumbs: he would do no man wrong.
The Parish Guardians, when his case is read,
     Will grant him (yet with no unseemly haste)
     Just seventeen pence to starve on, seven days long.