Get Up!
This poem appears in all the collections from 1871 onwards. In a letter to Skipsey in that year, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet, wrote of the poem: "This little piece seems to me equal to anything in the language for direct and quiet pathetic force." The poem also inspired a painting of the same name by Alfred Dixon (1842-1919).
“Get up!”
the caller cries, “Get up!
And
in the dead of night
To win the bairns their bite and sup
I
rise, a weary wight.
My flannel
dudden donn’d, thrice o’er
I
kiss the bairns, and then
With a sigh I shut the door
I
may not open again.