The Men Who Come Behind - Analysis

A poem that names a parasite

Lawson’s central claim is blunt: there is a recognizable type of person who lives off other people’s risk, and then pretends they earned the result. The phrase the men who come behind doesn’t mean humble followers or apprentices; it means opportunists who wait for someone else to clear the ground, then move in with caution masquerading as wisdom. From the start they are described as cunning, treacherous, suspicious, with hands that feel softly grasping hard—a vivid contradiction that captures the poem’s moral diagnosis: their gentleness is only technique.

The refrain-like return to comes behind gives the poem the feel of a warning repeated until it becomes instinct. Lawson isn’t trying to be subtle; he’s trying to make you recognize the pattern in your own life.

The oyster-shop: how success attracts imitation

The poem’s most concrete example—starting a little store, an oyster-shop—frames imitation as a kind of economic ambush. You take the first risk where there wasn’t one before, and only once the shop begins to pay you does the follower appear: another started by a chap behind you. The timing matters. Lawson is attacking not competition itself, but the moral cowardice of people who refuse the danger of beginning.

That cowardice is intellectual as much as financial. These people are Brainy, yet without the courage to leave the beaten track. They can calculate, but they won’t invent. The poem keeps returning to this mix of intelligence and fear, as if the worst damage is done not by ignorance but by timid cleverness.

“A friend of both and neither”: stirring conflict from the shadows

Lawson broadens the idea from business to relationships: a friend of both and neither slips between the two and starts a fight. Here, the men who come behind are not merely imitators but instigators—people who profit from drama they don’t have the courage to own. The image of others who fight like fiends while forgetting who began it sharpens the poem’s bitterness: the true culprit remains offstage, protected by the fact that louder people take the blame.

This section also hints at a tension in the speaker’s position. He speaks like someone who has watched this repeatedly, but also like someone nursing personal damage: So it is... with me and you. The poem’s anger feels earned, not theoretical, and that lived edge is part of its force.

Help that vanishes when the money does

The poem’s social critique turns harsher when it describes loyalty as purely transactional: They will stick to you like sin while your money comes and goes, then abandon you when you haven’t got a shilling. The comparison to sin is telling—sin doesn’t leave because it’s convenient; it clings because it’s hungry. Lawson suggests that these followers confuse intimacy with access.

There’s a grim realism in the line You may get some help above you, paired with the near-certainty that you won’t get assistance from those behind. The poem implies a social world where aid exists, but it doesn’t come from the people who most loudly attach themselves to you. The contradiction is painful: the ones closest to you in good times are the least reliable in bad times.

The writers “in the rear”: admiration as exploitation

Lawson saves special contempt for literary imitation. In the world of prose and rhyme, people scan for another’s footsteps on the sands of time—not to honor them, but to trace and copy them. He calls Journalistic imitators the meanest of mankind, and the insult isn’t merely personal vanity. It’s an argument that copying drains the life from genuine subjects: once a theme is seized by the crowd, your very own is stale.

The poem’s most memorable complaint is how the bush itself gets ruined by repetition: writers rave about wattle-bloom until the reader cursed the bushman and even the stink of it. Lawson isn’t condemning the landscape; he’s condemning how second-hand writing can make beauty feel like a cliché. The follower doesn’t just take your success—they spoil the thing you loved by overusing it.

Behind, then ahead: the moment the follower becomes a saboteur

A key turn arrives when the poem admits the follower’s strategy changes: They will follow while you’re groping for the light, but run to get before you once you’re going right. The phrase come behind suddenly contains its own opposite. These people aren’t content to trail; they want to overtake you at the exact moment your work begins to succeed. And if overtaking isn’t possible, they’ll trip you up and baulk you.

The final insult—Like a stupid pup—looks almost casual, but it lands hard. The follower is not noble, not even a worthy rival, just an undisciplined animal underfoot. Lawson’s anger isn’t only moral; it’s practical. These people create friction that makes progress harder than it needs to be.

A bitter invitation to leave them behind

The closing exhortation—Take your loads of sin and sorrow, strike across the country where there are not any tracks—imagines one escape: go where the imitators can’t easily follow. Yet even here Lawson can’t resist the final sting: the subject could be further treated, but he’ll leave it to be hackneyed by the fellows in the rear. The poem ends by performing what it predicts: he steps away first, daring the copyists to arrive after and flatten what he has made.