Work Poems

1. Toads by Philip Larkin
(1922-1985), 1955

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.




2. You will be Hearing from us Shortly by U. A. Fanthorpe
(1929-)1982

You feel adequate to the demands of this position?
What qualities do you feel you
Personally have to offer?

Ah.

Let us consider your application form.
Your qualifications, though impressive, are
Not, we must admit, precisely what
We had in mind. Would you care
To defend their relevance?

Indeed.

Now your age. Perhaps you feel able
To make your own comment about that,
Too? We are conscious ourselves
Of the need for a candidate with precisely
The right degree of immaturity.

So glad we agree.

And now a delicate matter: your looks.
You do appreciate this work involves
Contact with the actual public? Might they,
Perhaps, find your appearance
Disturbing?

Quite so.

And your accent. That is the way
You have always spoken, is it? What
Of your education? We mean, of course,
Where were you educated?
And how
Much of a handicap is that to you,
Would you say?

Married, children,
We see. The usual dubious
Desire to perpetuate what had better
Not have happened at all. We do not
Ask what domestic desires shimmer
Behind that vaguely unsuitable address.

And you were born -?
Yes. Pity.

So glad we agree.



3. The Chimney-Sweeper's Complaint by Mary Alcock
(c.1742-1798)

A chimney-sweeper's boy am I:
Pity my wretched fate!
Ah, turn your eyes; 'twould draw a tear.
Knew you my helpless state.

Far from my home, no parents I
Am ever doom'd to see;
My master, should I sue to him,
He'd flog the skin from me.

Ah, dearest Madam, dearest Sir,
Have pity on my youth:
Though black, and covered o'er with rags.
I tell you naught but truth.

My feeble limbs, benumb'd with cold,
Totter beneath the sack,
Which ere the morning dawn appears
Is loaded on my back.

My legs you see are burnt and bruis'd, My feet are galled by stones,
My flesh for lack of food is gone,
I'm little else but bones.

Yet still my master makes me work,
Nor spares me day or night:
His 'prentice boy he says I am,
And he will have his right.

‘Up to the highest top,’ he cries,
‘There call out chimney-sweep!’
With panting heart and weeping eyes
Trembling I upwards creep.

But stop! no more — I see him come;
Kind Sir, remember me!
Oh, could I hide me under ground,
How thankful should I be!



4. Work by D. H. Lawrence
(1885-1930), 1929

There is no point in work
unless it absorbs you
like an absorbing game.

If it doesn't absorb you
if it's never any fun,
don't do it.

When a man goes out into his work
he is alive like a tree in spring,
he is living, not merely working.

When the Hindus weave thin wool into long, long
lengths of stuff
With their thin dark hands and their wide dark eyes
and their still souls absorbed
they are like slender trees putting forth leaves, a long
white web of living leaf,
the tissue they weave,
and they clothe themselves in white as a tree clothes
itself in its own foliage.
As with cloth, so with houses, ships, shoes, wagons or
cups or loaves.
Men might put them forth as a snail its shell, as a bird
that leans
its breast against its nest, to make it round,

as the turnip models his round root, as the bush makes
flowers or gooseberries,
putting them forth, not manufacturing them,
and cities might be as once they were, bowers grown out
from the busy bodies of people.
And so it will be again, men will smash the machines.

At last, for the sake of clothing himself in his own leaflike
cloth
tissued from his life,
and dwelling in his own bowery house, like a beaver's
nibbled mansion
and drinking from cups that came off his fingers
like flowers off their five-fold stem
he will cancel the machines we have got.



5. What The Chairman Told Tom by Basil Banting
(1900-1985), 1965

Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.

It's not work. You dont sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.

Art, that's opera; or repertory -
The Desert Song.
Nancy was in the chorus.

But to ask for twelve pounds a week -
married, aren't you? -
you've got a nerve.

How could I look a bus conductor
in the face
if I paid you twelve pounds?

Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
an do it and rhyme.

I get three thousand and expenses,
a car, vouchers,
but I'm an accountant.

They do what I tell them,
my company.
What do you do?

Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They're Reds, addicts,
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.

Mr Hines says so, and he's a schoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work.