Most poems about virtue go looking for heroes. George Burnett Devine's "A Natural" goes looking for a man in old shoes who lifts his hat. The poem is a portrait of "Old Pat," a friendly acquaintance remembered by a speaker who clearly misses him, and its central claim is tucked into the final line: Pat was "also a natural gentleman." The title has been waiting for that word all along. Gentlemanliness, the poem argues, isn't a matter of clothes, money or polish. It's something a person simply is.
The poem builds this idea by piling up small habits rather than grand deeds. Pat greets people with "Good morning! / A very pleasant day!" and asks after their families. He listens to other people's troubles without matching them with a "tale of woe" of his own. He gives "each man his due," won't "knock another guy," and won't tell "a fib on you." None of this would make a headline. The poem's point is that character lives in exactly this kind of ordinary conduct, repeated day after day until it becomes who someone is.
The diction does a lot of the work. Devine uses relaxed, spoken language: "feller," "ritzy guy," "a-doin'," "sort o' glisten," "rotten luck." The speaker sounds like a man chatting about a neighbour, and that casualness is important. A poem about a gentleman written in grand, formal language would quietly contradict its own message. Here the plain talk matches Pat's plainness. Even the grammar slips ("When you was havin' rotten luck") in a way that feels warm rather than careless.
The poem is built from six quatrains with a loose ballad-like rhythm, short lines of roughly three or four stresses that bounce along like conversation. The rhyme is deliberately modest. Lines two and four tend to rhyme ("Pat" with "hat," "shoes" with "blues," "say" with "day"), which gives each stanza a gentle click of closure. The pattern isn't perfectly kept, though. "Listen" and "glisten" make a nice pairing in the fourth stanza, but "understand" and "gentleman" in the last are a near-rhyme at best, a slight roughness that suits a poem suspicious of polish.
The imagery is sparse, but a few details stick. The lifted hat is the first thing we learn about Pat, and it's a small ritual of courtesy that makes "the ladies" smile. His "old clothes and shoes" set up a contrast with the "ritzy guy" he is not. Best of all is the phrase "his eyes would sort o' glisten." That hedge, "sort o'," is touching. It suggests the speaker noticing something Pat would never announce, a flicker of sympathy in his face when someone was down. It's the poem's single moment of private feeling, and it works because it is so understated. Then there is the homeless dog, an image of cruelty that Pat refuses to commit. Not kicking a dog that has nothing is a tiny measure of decency, and the poem treats it as a serious one.
The last stanza turns from description to interpretation. "Some folks, there were, who didn't know, / And some who didn't understand" hints that Pat was underestimated, perhaps overlooked because he was "just 'Old Pat.'" The quotation marks around his nickname are telling. They suggest a label that made him easy to dismiss, and the final line quietly corrects that. The word "also" matters here: Pat was both an ordinary fellow and a gentleman, and the second doesn't cancel the first.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to inflate its subject. It would have been easy to turn Pat into a saint. Instead Devine keeps him human-sized, and in doing so offers a gentle challenge to the reader: the people who shape our days for the better may be the ones we call by a nickname and never think to praise. The poem is, in its small way, the praise they didn't get.