And What Have You To Say - Analysis

A taunt that doubles as a plea

The poem’s central move is simple and brutal: the speaker stages his own downfall and then turns to the reader with the recurring challenge And what have you to say? It sounds like swagger, but it’s also a defensive flinch, as if he’s bracing for judgment before it lands. He begins in a world of social warmth and flattering ceremony: ladies fair adjusting his overcoat and silken handkerchief, treating his throat as precious and his work as proof of the poet’s soul. That opening softness matters, because the rest of the poem is written from the wreckage of that earlier regard.

Even here, though, the speaker is already distancing himself. The admiration is framed as something they did—They used to see, They pleaded hard—while he claims the purer motive of labor: I had work / To do. The refrain arrives early, not as a triumphant chorus but as a cudgel: he worked the whole night through, so who gets to judge him now?

When ambition turns into blindness

The poem’s first real turn is the moment he admits what he couldn’t see. In the middle of being celebrated as their rising star, he says, I could not see they worshipped me, / Because I saw too far. The line is a neat knot of contradiction: his “vision” is also his blindness. He casts his forward-looking drive as a kind of moral alibi—he was too intent on the horizon to notice the human cost in the room. The parenthetical aside, ’Tis well for one or two, has a bitter edge: it suggests that some people are safer now that his star has fallen, hinting at envy, scandal, or simply the relief of seeing a celebrated man reduced to ordinary shame.

Those parentheses keep acting like swallowed thoughts. When he repeats I used to write for writing’s sake, the sentiment is sincere, but the aside also sounds like a defense offered to a jury. He loved my prose and poetry, he worked till day, so if he has ended up ruined, it wasn’t because he lacked devotion.

From gentlemen to common bars

The second, harsher turn comes with the present-tense portrait of what he has become. The old admirers would now gasp, he imagines, to see him slink down the street, trembling, begging a friend for tray-bit money for a drink. The diction shrinks his body and dignity at once: slinking, trembling, cadging. Lawson makes the decline social as much as physical. Once he used to drink with gentlemen as a casual pastime, to pass an hour away; now he drink[s] long beers in common bars. The repetition of I used to becomes a measuring stick: the distance between then and now is the poem’s real subject.

And still the refrain returns, sharper in this section because it’s aimed at the reader’s likely disgust. And what have you to say? starts to sound less like confidence and more like a dare to admit what everyone is already thinking.

Angels at the drunkard’s bed

Just when the poem risks becoming only a confession of degradation, it swerves into a strange kind of radiance: in the darkest night, when others see the devils dance, he hears the angels sing. The contrast doesn’t cancel his alcoholism; it complicates it. He imagines Heaven’s nurses whispering around the drunkard’s lonely bed, an image that is tender almost to the point of hallucination. The poem holds two realities in the same room: the body that slinks and cadges, and the ear that still catches music no one else can hear. That’s a key tension here: is this spiritual clarity, or the mind’s last self-protective beauty? The speaker offers it as evidence that he’s not only a wreck; something in him remains tuned to innocence or consolation.

A final claim: the work was for Truth and Right

The closing lines tighten the poem into its hardest insistence. He declares, I wrote for Truth and Right alone, and repeats the old pattern of labor, from night till day, but now it leads not to praise, only to an ending: I’ll find a drunken pauper grave. The refrain, asked one last time, becomes a pre-emptive epitaph. By signing off with Good night! / Good day! to My noble friends, he both salutes and mocks the audience that once approved of him—suggesting they are “noble” chiefly in their ability to stand at a safe distance from his collapse.

What makes the ending sting is that he never fully chooses between pride and remorse. He admits the shameful present in detail, yet he also claims a moral core for his art and even a kind of heavenly attention at his bedside. The poem leaves you with a deliberately uncomfortable possibility: that the same intensity that made him work the whole night through also helped break him—and that our judgment might be just another form of looking away.

The hardest question the refrain hides

When the speaker keeps asking And what have you to say?, he may not be challenging our moral standards so much as testing whether anyone will speak to him as a person, not a cautionary tale. If the ladies fair once fastened his collar and later would gasp to see him slink, what is the reader supposed to do: condemn, pity, or recognize how quickly admiration turns into abandonment?