For me but the venting of low, sweated groans,
That twelve hours a night have instilled in my bones.
Arturo Giovannitti won his reputation as a poet by a poem in blank verse which pictures the monotony of prison life. “The Walker” was written in jail, as was “The Bum,” the poem by which Giovannitti is best known among the hobos. As an I.W.W. and a radical, his writings breathe the spirit of protest. “The Bum,” the first three verses of which follow, is an eloquent tirade against religion:
The dust of a thousand roads, the grease
And grime of slums, were on his face;
The fangs of hunger and disease
Upon his throat had left their trace;
The smell of death was in his breath,
But in his eye no resting place.
Along the gutters, shapeless, fagged,