Swinging the Lead by Andrew Barton Paterson

Name: Swinging the Lead
Author: Andrew Barton Paterson

"Swinging the Lead" is a short comic ballad by Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, published in 1917 among his First World War verses, in which an Australian soldier tries to talk his way out of frontline duty by exaggerating a string of vague ailments to an army surgeon. The poem takes the form of a dialogue: in each of the first three stanzas the soldier presents a new complaint — ringing noises in his head, a bloated feeling after meals, insomnia in his own bed despite being able to doze on sentry duty, swollen legs that supposedly leave him barely able to walk, and so on — hoping each symptom will be judged serious enough to get him invalided home. He punctuates his pleas with self-undermining admissions, boasting in the same breath that he can hump a case of whisky half a mile or outrun everyone else sprinting for a dugout when enemy Taube aircraft appear overhead, inadvertently proving he is fitter than he claims. To every complaint the surgeon returns the same dry, punning refrain, "That's Lead!" — a diagnosis that plays on the old naval and military slang phrase "swinging the lead," meaning to shirk duty or fake illness, while also foreshadowing the poem's grim final twist. In the closing stanza the joke curdles: rather than being sent home, the malingering soldier is dispatched to the trenches after all, "safe and sound," where he is issued roughly two hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition. Puzzled by the weight of his new kit, he asks the sergeant what the heavy stuff is that he now has to carry, and the sergeant answers with the same refrain, "That's Lead!" — only now the word means literal bullets rather than a euphemism for fabricated illness. The pun collapses the soldier's fictitious burden into a real one: having spent the poem inventing a "heavy" affliction to escape the front, he ends up quite literally loaded down with lead in the form of live ammunition bound for combat. Structurally the piece is a tight, four-stanza music-hall-style ballad built almost entirely on repetition and escalating comic exaggeration, characteristic of Paterson's ear for vernacular Australian soldier speech (the clipped diction — "me head," "ain't adapted," "humped," "cruel" — evokes the larrikin voice found throughout his bush and war ballads). Where much of Paterson's earlier work romanticised bushmen, horsemen and colonial adventure, this wartime poem turns its wry, deflating humour on the ordinary digger's very human wish to dodge danger, and on army bureaucracy's blunt, unsentimental response to it. The soldier is not condemned so much as gently mocked: his cunning is transparent, his excuses self-defeating, and the surgeon's laconic one-line verdict undercuts every appeal without ever varying its wording, which is what gives the poem its comic rhythm and its final ironic sting. The double meaning of the title phrase — "swinging the lead" as slang for malingering, and "lead" as the metal of rifle bullets — is the poem's central conceit, and Paterson holds the pun in reserve until the last line, where the soldier's attempt to avoid the literal weight of war returns to him in exactly that form. The tone throughout is light and satirical rather than tragic, in keeping with trench-humour traditions of the period, using understatement and colloquial wit to comment obliquely on the futility of trying to escape military service once enlisted, and on the absurd gap between a soldier's self-serving story and the plain, repeated fact given back to him by his superiors.

By Andrew Barton Paterson · First published 1940 · Genre: Humorous Poetry, Satirical Poetry, War Poetry · 282 words

First lines

Said the soldier to the Surgeon, "I've got noises in me head / And a kind o' filled up feeling after every time I'm fed; / I can sleep all night on picket, but I can't sleep in my bed". / And the Surgeon said, / "That's Lead!"

Said the soldier to the surgeon, "Do you think they'll send me back? / For I really ain't adapted to be carrying a pack / Though I've humped a case of whisky half a mile upon my back". / And the Surgeon said, / "That's Lead!"

-"And my legs have swelled up cruel, I can hardly walk at all, / But when the Taubes come over you should see me start to crawl; / When we're sprinting for the dugout, I can easy beat 'em all". / And the Surgeon said, / "That's Lead."

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Genres

Humorous Poetry — The entire work is constructed around irony and wordplay, with the central pun of 'lead' (malingering) versus actual ammunition creating a comedic payoff.
Satirical Poetry — The poem satirizes malingering soldiers and military bureaucracy, mocking attempts to avoid duty through feigned ailments while exposing the futility of evasion.
War Poetry — Set explicitly during WWI (April 1918) with soldiers, trenches, dugouts, and combat aircraft as central elements, making the military context integral to meaning.
Narrative Poetry — Presents a complete story with character progression and plot arc, following the soldier from medical consultation through deployment into combat.

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Swinging the Lead is listed on Textopian as a poem by Andrew Barton Paterson, dated 1940 CE.

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Work type: Poem
Author: Andrew Barton Paterson
Date: 1940 CE
Language: English
Genres: Humorous Poetry, Satirical Poetry, War Poetry, Narrative Poetry, Australian Poetry
Length: 282 words
Structure: 1 section, 5 paragraphs
Reading fit: Easy (6th Grade)

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