The speaker of "Philanthropist" thinks he is being generous, and in five short lines the poem lets him show how little he sees. The title promises a "lover of humanity," which is what the Greek roots of the word mean. What follows is a tableau of a wealthy visitor, a dog, and some singing children, in which the love is hard to find.
Look at how the scene is staged. The first sentence is a fragment: "With the dog to see some poor children / in tawny clothes sing." There is no "I" and no main verb, just a purpose clause that seems to begin in the middle of a thought. The grammar is slightly off, with "to see ... sing" in place of the more natural "to hear them sing." That may be deliberate, or it may be the oddness of a translated or phrase-book sentence. Either way, the effect is that the children are something to be watched. The speaker comes with a dog, as if to a small show, and the children are introduced by their poverty ("poor") and their clothes. "Tawny" is the colour of a lion or a dog's coat, so the children are quietly lumped in with the animal beside the speaker. We never hear what they sing, and we never see their faces. They are the audience's scenery.
Only in line three does the speaker appear, and he takes over the grammar completely: "I give them five pieces in gold." The phrasing is old-fashioned, with "pieces" and "in gold" suggesting a storybook coin purse and not a modern donation. The gift is exact and countable, and it is announced by the giver himself. Then comes the strangest item on his list, "a sound lesson upon the flag." "Sound" does double duty. It means a thorough, sensible lesson, but it also echoes the singing the children have just produced, so the poem hints that he answers their music with a lecture. And the lesson is delivered "upon the flag," not about it, as though the flag were a platform or a cloth to be spread out. Money and patriotic instruction arrive in one package, and the poem lets us feel how easily charity and self-congratulation get bundled with duty.
The last line is where the poem tips from satire into something closer to absurdity: "a silver can of ham three stories high." Canned ham is cheap and mass-produced, the opposite of gold, yet the speaker gilds it with "silver." Then he inflates it to the height of a building. "Stories" is a pun the poem seems happy to leave lying around, since it means floors but also tales, and the speaker's boasting is itself a tall story. A can that size cannot be carried, opened or shared, so the gift is a monument to the giver's scale. After the three gifts, gold, lesson and ham, the list ends in bathos, and nothing in the poem suggests the children have any use for it.
The rhythm helps. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines lengthen as the speaker warms to his own generosity. The two short opening lines are halting. The middle lines are steadier, and the last line sprawls, ending on the open, rising vowel of "high." The poem swells like the can it describes. Its tone is deadpan: the speaker never says he is kind, and the narration never says he is foolish. All the judgement is in the title, which sits ironically over the scene, and in the reader's growing discomfort at what goes unsaid. The children get no lines of their own, no thanks, and no reaction. They sing, they receive, and the poem ends without them.
That silence is what makes this tiny poem worth reading. In under thirty words, it shows how giving can become a performance in which the recipients exist to be seen, instructed and impressed. It leaves us asking who the real beneficiary is. The poem asks this quietly, through a gold coin, a flag and an impossible can of ham.