Song Of The Six Hundred - Analysis

A chorus that admits the quiet part out loud

The poem’s central move is brutally simple: it makes Parliament speak as if it were an honest gang. The opening refrain—We are 'ere met together—sounds like a civic ritual, but the purpose is immediately debased into lick th' bankers' dirty boots and keep the Bank in power. Pound frames political assembly not as deliberation but as service work for finance. That nastiness is intensified by the comic bluntness of the diction: the line doesn’t argue or justify; it boasts. The poem’s satire depends on that mismatch between ceremonial language (momentous hower) and servile action.

In the second stanza, the “mission statement” widens from banking to social control: grind the same old axes and keep the people in its place, with taxes as the mechanism. The phrase a'payin' us the taxes makes the public’s role purely financial—citizens reduced to a revenue stream. The tension here is sharp: government claims legitimacy from the people, yet these speakers openly treat the people as something to manage and milk.

The six hundred: bodies without minds

The title’s Six Hundred becomes a grotesque inventory of flesh. They are six hundred beefy men, then instantly deflated: but mostly gas and suet. It’s not just insult; it’s an image of politics as bloated digestion—energy diverted into self-maintenance rather than thought. Even their agency is hollowed out by the joke that each year they meet to let / some other feller do it. The poem accuses this class of men of two things at once: they are overfed, and they are lazy. Leadership is pictured as a rotating excuse not to act.

High hats, benches, and the stink of what’s outside

Midway, the poem pivots from the mock-chorus to a watching speaker: I see their 'igh 'ats on the seats, the bodies sprawling on the benches. Those “high hats” aren’t just clothing; they’re a quick shorthand for class entitlement, a sign that authority is literally sitting where it likes. Then the speaker’s mind jumps to a Rowton 'ouse—a cheap lodging house—and small street stenches. That leap matters: it drags the smell of poverty into the chamber. The governing contrast becomes physical comfort versus urban stink, upholstered benches versus overcrowded beds. The poem’s anger isn’t abstract; it is located in where bodies get to rest, and what they have to breathe.

Asking Britain for a trade: brains for beer

The apostrophe O Britain, muvver of parliaments is the poem’s loudest turn toward lament, but it stays insulting. The speaker imagines the nation as a mother whose “litter” of lawmakers may be her larst sweet litter, a phrase that mixes affection and disgust—sweetness applied to something animal. The question that follows is deliberately low and pub-sized: could she swap th' brains of them all for 'arft a pint o' bitter? The wager is that their collective intelligence is worth less than beer. It’s funny, but the joke lands as a moral verdict: a political class can become so empty that even small pleasures outweigh it.

The mother’s reply: defending democracy with footling men

Britain’s answer is the poem’s coldest irony. She says she can’t swap them because They're me own, and then she names them: As footlin' a lot as ever spawned to defend democracy. The contradiction is the poem’s final sting: these men are presented as stupid, bloated, and servile to bankers, yet they are also the official defenders of the system. The word defend is doing bitter work—suggesting that “democracy” here is not a living public power but a label used as a shield for incompetence and capture. The poem ends not with reform but with ownership: the nation keeps what it has bred.

A sharper question the poem won’t let go of

If these men openly admit they meet to keep the Bank in power, what exactly is the democracy they claim to defend? The poem forces the possibility that “democracy” can become a costume worn by 'igh 'ats while the real governing happens at the level of boots and taxes. And if Britain calls them me own, the satire turns back on the country itself: the problem is not only the six hundred, but the maternal pride—or resignation—that keeps producing them.