Fight! don’t you feel you’re fading
into slow death?
Fight then, poor duffers degrading
your very breath.
Open your half-dead eyes
you half-alive young,
look round and realise
the muck from which you’ve sprung.
The money-muck, you simple flowers
of your forefathers’ muck-heap;
and the money-muck-worms, the extant powers
that have got you in keep.
Old money-worms, young money-worms
money-worm professors
spinning a glamour round money, and clergymen
lifting a bank-book to bless us!
In the odour of lucrative sanctity
stand they - and god, how they stink!
Rise then, my young men, rise at them!
Or if you can’t rise, just think —
Think of the world that you’re stifling in,
think what a world it might be!
Think of the rubbish you’re trifling in
with enfeebled vitality!
And then, if you amount to a hill o’ beans
start in and bust it all;
money, hypocrisy, greed, machines
that have ground you so small.