And why?
Because there is not sixpence on me.
Bah!
The sun goes down,
The birds wheel home,
But I remain here,
Drifting empty under the night,
Drifting——
When one is well away with this part of the poem it is almost impossible to stop. When you are writing in metre you come eventually to the eighth line of the last verse and you have to stop; but in vers libre you have no assistance of that kind. This particular poem is being written for instructional purposes in a journal of limited capacity, so it will probably have to stop fairly soon; but in practice it would go on for a long time yet. In any case, however, it would end in the same way, like this:—
Mud, mud,