Since The Cities Are The Cities - Analysis

A rebuke that turns into a call to enlist

Lawson’s central push is plain: city people must stop congratulating themselves for noticing danger late, and start taking responsibility for the nation they’ve benefited from. The opening is scalding, aimed at the easy satisfactions of hindsight. Fools can parrot-cry the prophet and Told-you-so is not a warning refuse the smug pose of the commentator who only speaks when the proof is close at hand. The tone is impatient, almost prosecutorial, and it sets up the poem’s moral frame: when crisis arrives, clever talk and blame are luxuries.

The poem’s first turn comes with the dogs of war are loosed. From there, the voice shifts from accusation to mobilization: we all must stand together. Even this unity is uneasy, though, because it’s built on a confession: Our great sins were of omission. The speaker insists the nation’s failure wasn’t always cruelty but neglect—yet neglect is treated as a sin that still come[s] home to roost.

Cities that won’t fall, and a conscience that might

The title line, repeated as a premise—Since the cities are the cities—is more than a shrug. It’s Lawson’s hard realism: towns are permanent facts, and therefore they carry permanent obligations. Let us justify our being has the sting of a courtroom phrase; existence itself is something the townsfolk must earn, be it peace or be it war. The tension is sharp: the city is presented as both sheltered and enduring, while the moral standing of the city-dweller is fragile and up for judgment.

This is why the poem refuses the easy solution of outsourcing virtue to the bush. The question—Shall we call the bush to aid us—isn’t asking for help so much as exposing a habit: letting the country do the suffering while the city claims the benefits. The speaker reminds readers what their comfort depended on: Westward went our brothers into drought, and loneliness while we lived in light and comfort. That contrast isn’t decorative; it’s an indictment that powers the later call: Now’s our time.

The bush built the nation, but the city must defend it

Lawson praises the frontier labour in a catalogue of tools—cross-cut, wedges, spade and axe, saddle-packs—making nation-building feel like physical weight. Yet he refuses to let that become a myth that shames the city into silence. The bush workers have mighty work before them, and the city must become the Rearguard by the Sea. That phrase reassigns heroism: not only the pioneers at the edge but the townsfolk holding the line at home.

The poem’s emotional hinge sits here: guilt is not meant to paralyze. If earlier the city was condemned for never shared the hardships, now the city is offered a way to act without pretending to be something it isn’t. Even the office becomes a staging ground for duty: the crouched type-writer and the man with the yard-stick are asked whether they can lay the gun or press the button the less firmly. Lawson’s point isn’t that clerks are secretly soldiers; it’s that citizenship demands competence under pressure, whatever your tools usually are.

Urban courage, stripped of romance

To make this believable, Lawson brings in examples that are almost deliberately unglamorous. He recalls street-bred men surviving desert, scrub and jungle, and he praises endurance that doesn’t look heroic: Human weeds winning where beef-born courage failed. Even the historical city is shown at its ugliest and bravest—people in sieges eating horseflesh, dogs and rats—to prove that cities have always produced defenders, not just spectators.

There’s a corrective edge here, too: Lawson is wary of a bush-centric nationalism that treats the city as decadent by definition. The poem declares the days of gibes are over, including gibes made by street-bred bards—a pointed jab at urban writers who flatter the bush while living off the city’s safety.

The final claim: nationality over type, heart over costume

The ending works like a moral settlement. Lawson concedes the ordinary desire for a private life—Every man should have a cottage—but then overrules it with the blunt permanence of the civic world: cities stand until the end. Farmers may love a country, clerks may love a city; the poem asks that both loves count as real. The last couplet sharpens the poem’s key contradiction—between appearance and belonging—into a maxim: ’Tis the head and not the feathers! and ’tis the heart and not the man!. National duty, Lawson argues, is not a costume of toughness or a geography of virtue; it’s a chosen steadiness when comfort can no longer be an excuse.