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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=408701" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>One Hundred and Three</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">With the frame of a man, and the face of a boy, and a manner strangely wild,<br>And the great, wide, wondering, innocent eyes of a silent-suffering child;<br>With his hideous dress and his heavy boots, he drags to Eternity—<br>And the Warder says, in a softened tone: ‘Keep step, One Hundred and Three.’ <br>’Tis a ghastly travesty of drill—or a ghastly farce of work—<br>But One Hundred and Three, he catches step with a start, a shuffle and jerk.<br>’Tis slow starvation in separate cells, and a widow’s son is he,<br>And the widow, she drank before he was born—(Keep step, One Hundred and Three!) </div><div style="margin:10px 0">They shut a man in the four-by-eight, with a six-inch slit for air,<br>Twenty-three hours of the twenty-four, to brood on his virtues there.<br>And the dead stone walls and the iron door close in as an iron band<br>On eyes that followed the distant haze far out on the level land. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Bread and water and hominy, and a scrag of meat and a spud,<br>A Bible and thin flat book of rules, to cool a strong man’s blood;<br>They take the spoon from the cell at night—and a stranger might think it odd;<br>But a man might sharpen it on the floor, and go to his own Great God. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">One Hundred and Three, it is hard to believe that you saddled your horse at dawn;<br>There were girls that rode through the bush at eve, and girls who lolled on the lawn.<br>There were picnic parties in sunny bays, and ships on the shining sea;<br>There were foreign ports in the glorious days—(Hold up, One Hundred and Three!) </div><div style="margin:10px 0">A man came out at exercise time from one of the cells to-day:<br>’Twas the ghastly spectre of one I knew, and I thought he was far away;<br>We dared not speak, but he signed ‘Farewell—fare—well,’ and I knew by this<br>And the number stamped on his clothes (not sewn) that a heavy sentence was his. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Where five men do the work of a boy, with warders not to see,<br>It is sad and bad and uselessly mad, it is ugly as it can be,<br>From the flower-beds laid to fit the gaol, in circle and line absurd,<br>To the gilded weathercock on the church, agape like a strangled bird. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Agape like a strangled bird in the sun, and I wonder what he could see?<br>The Fleet come in, and the Fleet go out? (Hold up, One Hundred and Three!)<br>The glorious sea, and the bays and Bush, and the distant mountains blue<br>(Keep step, keep step, One Hundred and Three, for my lines are halting too) </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The great, round church with its volume of sound, where we dare not turn our eyes—<br>They take us there from our separate hells to sing of Paradise.<br>In all the creeds there is hope and doubt, but of this there is no doubt:<br>That starving prisoners faint in church, and the warders carry them out. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">They double-lock at four o’clock and the warders leave their keys,<br>And the Governor strolls with a friend at eve through his stone conservatories;<br>Their window slits are like idiot mouths with square stone chins adrop,<br>And the weather-stains for the dribble, and the dead flat foreheads atop. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">No light save the lights in the yard beneath the clustering lights of the Lord—<br>And the lights turned in to the window slits of the Observation Ward.<br>(They eat their meat with their fingers there in a madness starved and dull—<br>Oh! the padded cells and the “O—b—s” are nearly always full.) </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Rules, regulations—red-tape and rules; all and alike they bind:<br>Under ‘separate treatment ’ place the deaf; in the dark cell shut the blind!<br>And somewhere down in his sandstone tomb, with never a word to save,<br>One Hundred and Three is keeping step, as he’ll keep it to his grave. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The press is printing its smug, smug lies, and paying its shameful debt—<br>It speaks of the comforts that prisoners have, and ‘holidays’ prisoners get.<br>The visitors come with their smug, smug smiles through the gaol on a working day,<br>And the public hears with its large, large ears what authorities have to say. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">They lay their fingers on well-hosed walls, and they tread on the polished floor;<br>They peep in the generous shining cans with their ration Number Four.<br>And the visitors go with their smug, smug smiles; the reporters’ work is done;<br>Stand up! my men, who have done your time on ration Number One! </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Speak up, my men! I was never the man to keep my own bed warm,<br>I have jogged with you round in the Fools’ Parade, and I’ve worn your uniform;<br>I’ve seen you live, and I’ve seen you die, and I’ve seen your reason fail—<br>I’ve smuggled tobacco and loosened my tongue—and I’ve been punished in gaol. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ay! clang the spoon on the iron floor, and shove in the bread with your toe,<br>And shut with a bang the iron door, and clank the bolt—just so,<br>With an ignorant oath for a last good-night—or the voice of a filthy thought.<br>By the Gipsy Blood you have caught a man you’ll be sorry that ever you caught. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">He shall be buried alive without meat, for a day and a night unheard<br>If he speak to a fellow prisoner, though he die for want of a word.<br>He shall be punished, and he shall be starved, and he shall in darkness rot,<br>He shall be murdered body and soul—and God said, ‘Thou shalt not!’ </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I’ve seen the remand-yard men go out, by the subway out of the yard—<br>And I’ve seen them come in with a foolish grin and a sentence of Three Years Hard.<br>They send a half-starved man to the court, where the hearts of men they carve—<br>Then feed him up in the hospital to give him the strength to starve. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">You get the gaol-dust in your throat, in your skin the dead gaol-white;<br>You get the gaol-whine in your voice and in every letter you write.<br>And in your eyes comes the bright gaol-light—not the glare of the world’s distraught,<br>Not the hunted look, nor the guilty look, but the awful look of the Caught. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">There was one I met—’twas a mate of mine—in a gaol that is known to us;<br>He died—and they said it was ‘heart disease’; but he died for want of a truss.<br>I’ve knelt at the head of the pallid dead, where the living dead were we,<br>And I’ve closed the yielding lids with my thumbs—(Keep step, One Hundred and Three!) </div><div style="margin:10px 0">A criminal face is rare in gaol, where all things else are ripe—<br>It is higher up in the social scale that you’ll find the criminal type.<br>But the kindness of man to man is great when penned in a sandstone pen—<br>The public call us the ‘criminal class,’ but the warders call us ‘the men.’ </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The brute is a brute, and a kind man kind, and the strong heart does not fail—<br>A crawler’s a crawler everywhere, but a man is a man in gaol!<br>For forced ‘desertion’ or drunkenness, or a law’s illegal debt,<br>While never a man who was a man was ‘reformed’ by punishment yet. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The champagne lady comes home from the course in charge of the criminal swell—<br>They carry her in from the motor car to the lift in the Grand Hotel.<br>But armed with the savage Habituals Act they are waiting for you and me,<br>And the drums, they are beating loud and near. (Keep step, One Hundred and Three!) </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The clever scoundrels are all outside, and the moneyless mugs in gaol—<br>Men do twelve months for a mad wife’s lies or Life for a strumpet’s tale.<br>If the people knew what the warders know, and felt as the prisoners feel—<br>If the people knew, they would storm their gaols as they stormed the old Bastile. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And the cackling, screaming half-human hens who were never mothers nor wives<br>Would send their sisters to such a hell for the term of their natural lives,<br>Where laws are made in a Female Fit in the Land of the Crazy Fad,<br>And drunkards in judgment on drunkards sit and the mad condemn the mad. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The High Church service swells and swells where the tinted Christs look down—<br>It is easy to see who is weary and faint and weareth the thorny crown.<br>There are swift-made signs that are not to God, and they march us Hellward then.<br>It is hard to believe that we knelt as boys to ‘for ever and ever, Amen. ’ </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Warders and prisoners all alike in a dead rot dry and slow—<br>The author must not write for his own, and the tailor must not sew.<br>The billet-bound officers dare not speak and discharged men dare not tell<br>Though many and many an innocent man must brood in this barren hell. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">We are most of us criminal, most of us mad, and we do what we can do.<br>(Remember the Observation Ward and Number Forty-Two.)<br>There are eyes that see through stone and iron, though the rest of the world be blind— <br>We are prisoners all in God’s Great Gaol, but the Governor, He is kind. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">They crave for sunlight, they crave for meat, they crave for the might-have-been,<br>But the cruellest thing in the walls of a gaol is the craving for nicotine.<br>Yet the spirit of Christ is everywhere where the heart of a man can dwell,<br>It comes like tobacco in prison—or like news to the separate cell. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>They have smuggled him out to the Hospital with no one to tell the tale,<br>But it’s little the doctors and nurses can do for the patient from Starvinghurst Gaol.<br>He cannot swallow the food they bring, for a gaol-starved man is he,<br>And the blanket and screen are ready to draw—(Keep step, One Hundred and Three!) <br>‘What were you doing, One Hundred and Three?’ and the answer is ‘Three years hard,<br>And a month to go’—and the whisper is low: ‘There’s the moonlight—out in the yard.’<br>The drums, they are beating far and low, and the footstep’s light and free,<br>And the angels are whispering over his bed: ‘Keep step, One Hundred and Three!’</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Henry+Lawson">Henry Lawson</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=408701" data-title="One Hundred and Three de Henry Lawson" data-description="With the frame of a man, and the face of a boy, and a manner strangely wild,
And the great, wide, wondering, innocent eyes of a silent-suffering child;
With his hideous dress and his heavy boots, he drags to Eternity—
And the Warder says, in a s..."></div>
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