The only care That I shall share Shall be the care of others, And on the road I'll halve the load Of overburdened brothers. I rather guess It's selfishness That drives me to such actions, For in this plan I find I can Forget my own distractions.

In these rhymed stanzas, Bangs frames altruism as both moral practice and psychological strategy. The speaker resolves to “share” only the “care of others,” picturing charity as a literal act of load-sharing on life’s road. The twist comes in the candid admission that such helpfulness may be “selfishness”: by taking up another’s burdens, the speaker can “forget my own distractions.” The poem thus complicates simple moralizing. It suggests that compassion can be mutually beneficial—relieving others while also quieting one’s private anxieties—and that motives need not be pure to produce real good. Bangs’s light, epigrammatic tone makes the ethical point without sermonizing.