WHEN LADS have done with labor
in Shropshire, one will cry,
“Let's go and kill a neighbor,”
and t'other answers “Aye!”

So this one kills his cousins,
and that one kills his dad;
and, as they hang by dozens
at Ludlow, lad by lad,

each of them one-and-twenty,
all of them murderers,
the hangman mutters: “Plenty
even for Housman's verse.”