[Editor: This poem by Henry Lawson was published in Verses Popular and Humorous, 1900.]
The Old Jimmy Woodser
The old Jimmy Woodser comes into the bar,
Unwelcomed, unnoticed, unknown,
Too old and too odd to be drunk with, by far ;
And he glides to the end where the lunch baskets are
And they say that he tipples alone.
His frock-coat is green and the nap is no more,
And the style of his hat is at rest.
He wears the peaked collar our grandfathers wore,
The black-ribboned tie that was legal of yore,
And the coat buttoned over his breast.
When first he came in, for a moment I thought
That my vision or wits were astray ;
For a picture and page out of Dickens he brought,
’Twas an old file dropped in from the Chancery Court
To a wine-vault just over the way.
But I dreamed as he tasted his bitters to-night,
And the lights in the bar-room grew dim,
That the shades of the friends of that other day’s light,
And of girls that were bright in our grandfathers’ sight,
Lifted shadowy glasses to him.
And I opened the door as the old man passed out,
With his short, shuffling step and bowed head ;
And I sighed, for I felt as I turned me about,
An odd sense of respect — born of whisky no doubt —
For the life that was fifty years dead.
And I thought — there are times when our memory trends
Through the future, as ’twere, on its own —
That I, out of date ere my pilgrimage ends,
In a new fashioned bar to dead loves and dead friends
Might drink like the old man alone :
While they whisper, ‘He boozes alone.’
Source:
Henry Lawson. Verses Popular and Humorous, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1900, pages 67-68
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