Most poems that open with a ragged man on a street corner want us to feel pity, and for four stanzas "Saps and Craps" gives us exactly that. Then the last two lines pull the rug out. The beggar who has been coughing and kneeling and quoting his dead Christian parents turns out to be a performer, and the people who emptied their pockets for him are, in his own word, "saps." The poem is a small con in verse: it runs the same trick on the reader that the drifter runs on the churchgoers.
The setup is careful. We get the beggar's "shoulders slightly bent," his "badly battered" hat, his clothes "torn and rent." The scene is staged with the same care a con man would give it. It is a "Sabbath morning," "bright and fair," with church bells "softly ringing, / Calling folks to prayer." The timing is the first clue, though only in hindsight: a man who wants charity from the devout knows precisely when and where to stand. The poem's narrator never tips us off, and that restraint is what makes the ending work.
The beggar's speech is a masterclass in what he knows his audience wants to hear. He asks for a "mite" for "coffee / And perhaps a little bite," modest, almost apologetic requests. He confesses a respectable past: "I used to go to worship / In a bygone better day." He reaches for the right words, "Christian people," orphaned young, "just a drifter," a "badly busted lung." Each detail lifts him out of the category of idler and into the category of the deserving poor. Then comes the final touch of theater: he "paused and coughed with anguish, / His hand upon his heart." The gesture is slightly too perfect, and in retrospect it reads like a stage direction.
The most interesting word choice comes in the fourth stanza, where the narrator calls him "that bozo" while describing how the sight "Would make the grand tears start." The slangy insult sits oddly beside the sentimental scene, and it hints that the narrator may know more than he lets on. The generosity of the churchgoers is rendered in the same quiet way, as a list that grows: "dimes and nickels / And a brand new dollar bill." The bill's freshness is a nice touch; the givers are not just parting with spare change but with something crisp and a little bit special. Their motive is stated plainly: "They felt so very sorry, / He really did look ill." The second line is the poem's cruelest irony, since looking ill is precisely the thing he has worked up.
Formally, the poem is built from simple ballad-like quatrains, with short lines of roughly three or four stresses and a loose rhyme on the second and fourth lines (bent/rent, fair/prayer, trees/knees, mite/bite). The rhythm bounces rather than broods, which suits a comic story rather than a tragic one. The bounce also lulls us. We read it in a plain, sing-song voice, the way we might read a sentimental temperance tale, so the reversal at the end lands harder. The last stanza even shifts the tone of the rhymes: "saps" and "craps" snap together with a slangy click that the earlier, gentler rhymes never allow.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it handles sympathy. It does not simply say that beggars lie; it shows how the performance works, and how willingly the audience buys it. The beggar's thanks are warm: "His smile was good to see," he wishes them "good morning," says they've been "so good to me." The irony is that this is probably the one sincere moment in the poem, and he is gleefully insincere about everything else. The churchgoers, on their way to worship, are left holding a feeling of virtue they have purchased cheaply, while their money goes to a dice game. The poem's final sting is an uncomfortable one: kindness can be exploited, and the exploiter may enjoy it far more than the giver does.