The Two Samaritans And The Tramp - Analysis

Kindness, and the question of what actually helps

Lawson’s poem makes a plain, cheeky claim: goodness isn’t only a matter of pious intention—it’s also a matter of what a person truly needs in the moment. The tramp walks through a warm an’ muggy afternoon and meets two would-be Samaritans: a parson in a buggy and a bullock-driver on the road. Both give, both mean to help, but the poem nudges us to notice the difference between charity that performs virtue and charity that answers thirst with something like comradeship.

The parson frames his gift with moral language—As follerers ov the Loard—and carefully pours from a water-bag. The gesture is decent, but Lawson’s phrasing makes it feel like a small sermon attached to a small mercy. It’s not just water; it’s water as proof that the giver is the sort of person who gives. Then the parson went rattlin’ ’ome to where his family is thrivin’, and that detail quietly underlines the distance between the comfortable helper and the exposed man on foot.

The bullock-driver’s beer and the poem’s comic wink

The second Samaritan doesn’t preach. He sizes up the day—It’s bilin’ ’ot—and responds with a pint of beer from a little keg. The tone turns openly comic with the parenthetical note: The ah is meant to mark the tramp drinking. That aside is more than a joke; it’s Lawson insisting on bodily reality. The tramp’s ah! is a tiny human truth that competes with the parson’s high-mindedness. The beer is presented as pleasure, yes, but also as relief, a rough kind of fellowship offered without a lecture.

A tension Lawson refuses to “solve”

The poem’s closing shift is the key turn: the speaker insists, I ain’t agin the temperance and Nor yet no advocate ov drinkin’. He doesn’t want to be filed neatly as pro-booze or anti-religion. Instead, he tells the story because it set me thinkin’. The tension sits there unresolved: water is morally unimpeachable but emotionally thin; beer is morally suspect but feels like it meets the tramp as a person rather than a project.

What kind of goodness needs an audience?

The poem quietly asks whether the parson’s goodness depends on being seen as good. The bullock-driver’s gift has no banner, only heat, dust, and a shared understanding of hardship. By ending on thought rather than a moral, Lawson leaves us with an uncomfortable possibility: sometimes the more “righteous” help is also the less attentive help, and the tramp’s grateful ah becomes the poem’s simplest measure of what mercy feels like.