| Louis Untermeyer, ed. (1885–1977). Modern British Poetry. 1920. |
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| Patrick Macgill. 1890– |
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| 159. By-the-Way |
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| THESE be the little verses, rough and uncultured, which | |
| I've written in hut and model, deep in the dirty ditch, | |
| On the upturned hod by the palace made for the idle rich. | |
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| Out on the happy highway, or lines where the engines go, | |
| Which fact you may hardly credit, still for your doubts 'tis so, | 5 |
| For I am the person who wrote them, and surely to God, I know! | |
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| Wrote them beside the hot-plate, or under the chilling skies, | |
| Some of them true as death is, some of them merely lies, | |
| Some of them very foolish, some of them otherwise. | |
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| Little sorrows and hopings, little and rugged rhymes, | 10 |
| Some of them maybe distasteful to the moral men of our times, | |
| Some of them marked against me in the Book of the Many Crimes. | |
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| These, the Songs of a Navvy, bearing the taint of the brute, | |
| Unasked, uncouth, unworthy out to the world I put, | |
| Stamped with the brand of labor, the heel of a navvy's boot. | 15 |
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