When he hears the dullest dunces in the town cry, “Tommyrot!”
And the johnny push abolish it as “Tripe!”
[182]
]For at times the breath of Life grows cold, the outlook brown and flat,
And without one touch of colour there at all;
And there’s nothing but a vacancy beneath a rhymer’s hat,
And the pictures all are “turned towards the wall.”
Then he reaches for a bottle of Glen Shicker on the shelf,
As a cobber who may share the strain and stress
With a very seedy poet, who pours piffle out for pelf,
In the columns of the western Sunday Press.