Three tercets, no punctuation, a single capital letter. In that small space, an evening of class contempt is sketched and then quietly buried. The title puts us "at the club," and the first stanza gives one sharp picture: a Parliament-man in "a pretty pair of gloves," cursing the poor. The poem never says the gloves and the cursing belong together. It lets the grammar do that, with the gloves arriving first as hands that have never needed to work. The adjective "pretty" is slight and faintly mocking, and the curse lands after it.
The second stanza is harder to place. "how they fight till they drop" could be the club's grudging talk about the poor, or the speaker's own awed observation. The poem doesn't settle it, and that uncertainty is part of its pull. The phrase "though their eyes be unlucky" sounds older than everyday speech, like a proverb or an overheard remark, and the subjunctive "be" gives it a borrowed, secondhand ring. Judging by the diction, the poem seems to want the poor described in someone else's voice. "Unlucky" also echoes "cursing" from the stanza before. The poor are cursed at by the man in gloves and cursed by fate, and the poem lets one word carry both. Then comes "as if they had no bread." It can mean they fight as desperately as the starving, or, in a sneering tone, that they carry on as though they were starving. Either way, bread is the plain measure of need.
The poem has no rhyme. The line endings (gloves, man, poor; drop, unlucky, bread; moon, house, tide) make no pattern, and the sound work happens inside the lines. The first stanza is full of plosive p's: "pretty pair," "Parliament," "poor." Read aloud, they sound like puffed-up speech or a little spit of disdain. The rhythm has a light, almost nursery-rhyme bounce, about three beats a line, as in "a PRETty PAIR of GLOVES." That jauntiness is cruel when set beside the subject. The second stanza turns hard and heavy. "Fight" and "drop" are short, closed words, and "drop" falls like the people it describes. The third stanza slows and softens, with long vowels, sibilants and a final line that stretches out: "down into the morning tide."
That last stanza leaves the club and its people behind and gives us a landscape. "The white hearse of a moon" is a strange, memorable image. Hearses are usually black, so a white one feels pale, ghostly and perhaps hungry-looking. The moon becomes a vehicle carrying something away. It "set[s] over a sad house," and the poem withholds whose house this is. It might be the household of the poor or somewhere else entirely. Then the moon goes "down into the morning tide," and since the moon and the tide belong together, the image feels natural and inevitable. It also marks the end of a night, with the talk over and dawn coming. Placed after "fight till they drop" and "no bread," the hearse suggests, without saying so, where the fighting ends.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves out. There is no moral and no "I," and nothing tells us how to feel. Each stanza works like a separate shot: a pair of hands, a snatch of talk, a sky. The reader has to join them. Even the capital letter is telling. "Parliament-man" is the only capitalised word, so power gets the capital while the poor and the moon stay lowercase. The compound itself sounds a little dismissive, as though the speaker refuses to grant him a dignified title.
For students, the poem shows how a social argument can be made through juxtaposition rather than statement. Pretty gloves, a curse, a hunger and a hearse are laid side by side, and the poem trusts the space between them to speak.