As a bullock falls in the crooked ruts, he fell when the day was o’er,
The hunger gripping his stinted guts, his body shaken and sore.
They pulled it out of the ditch in the dark, as a brute is pulled from its lair,
The corpse of the navvy, stiff and stark, with the clay on its face and hair.
In Christian lands, with calloused hands, he labored for others’ good,
In workshop and mill, ditchway and drill, earnest, eager, and rude;
Unhappy and gaunt with worry and want, a food to the whims of fate,
Hashing it out and booted about at the will of the goodly and great.
To him was applied the scorpion lash, for him the gibe and the goad—
The roughcast fool of our moral wash, the rugous wretch of the road.