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This fragment separates hard labor from evil, then leaves obedience itself hanging as the more troubling condition.

Its force comes from where it stops. Shoveling coal is cleared of demonic meaning, but "taking any kind of order" is left unresolved, as if the moral danger begins exactly where labor turns into submission.

A two-line distillation of the preceding page's thesis: 'I knew shoveling coal was not the devil / And I knew that taking any kind of order / was.' The force is in where it breaks off - hard labor is cleared of evil, but 'taking any kind of order' is left hanging on a bare 'was,' as if the moral danger begins exactly where work becomes submission.