W.H.Davies has been mentioned here but I can never think of him as a true Georgian, not middle-class enough and his style not literary enough, too rough and unsophisticated. Marrying a 20 year-old prostitute when he was 50 must have escaped the notice of the civil servant who allowed his name to be submitted to the PM as a possible Poet Laureate.
SHEEP
When I was once in Baltimore
A man came up to me and cried,
"Come, I have eighteen hundred sheep,
And we will sail on Tuesday's tide.
If you will sail with me, young man,
I'll pay you fifty shillings down;
These eighteen hundred sheep I take
From Baltimore to Glasgow town."
He paid me fifty shillings down,
I sailed with eighteen hundred sheep;
We soon had cleared the harbour's mouth,
We soon were in the salt sea deep.
The first night we were out at sea
Those sheep were quiet in their mind;
The second night they cried with fear -
They smelt no pastures in the wind.
They sniffed poor things for their green fields,
They cried so loud I could not sleep:
For fifty thousand shillings down
I would not sail again with sheep.
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