His natural life! Back again in the cell,
He'd time to think it over, what it meant.
Condemned to penal servitude for the term ...
And then the judge's voice had dropped; and yet
His head still throbbed and echoed like a bell
With the words he'd hardly caught then. Natural life ...
Why, 'twould be natural, till his days were spent,
To go on living with his bairns and wife;
Ay, and to go on working for the firm
He'd always worked with — till that day, when he
Had quarrelled with the manager, and let
His temper master him ... and he saw red!
His natural life — why, it was mockery!
How could he get back to it, when there lay
The body of a dead man in the way
Between him and his natural life? And he,
Condemned to dwell for ever with the dead ...
You couldn't call that natural! If they'd only
Brought it in murder not manslaughter — well,
He'd be a corpse with corpses, not a lonely
Still breathing human being, forced to dwell
For ever with a dead man in a cell;
To lie down with a dead man; and to rise
With a dead man at dawn; and break his bread
Each mealtime with a dead man, whose cold eyes,
Under the sleek white dome of his bald head,
Coldly surveyed him with a silly sneer —
The sneer that riled him when he'd struck out blindly,
Catching the silly smiler under the ear;
And the bald head he hated had gone down,
Crashing against a pillar. . . . On the crown
You saw the scar at night, still burning red. . . .

His natural life — they would have sounded kindly,
Those cruel words, if they'd meant what they meant
Perhaps they did mean — he, a murderer ...
Ay, he must live a murderer's natural life,
Haunted and harried till his days were spent,
Bearing the brand of Cain upon his brow.
Somebody at the door: they'd brought his wife:
And he must pull himself together now
To do what little he could to comfort her.