Let us honor if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.

In four clipped lines, the speaker contrasts the “vertical man” (upright, living, principled, perhaps morally independent) with the “horizontal one” (the person laid out flat—dead—or, more broadly, the compliant figure who “goes along” with society). The irony is that we claim to honor integrity while in practice we reserve our real esteem for what is inert, safe, and socially manageable: the dead (whom we can praise without being challenged) or the conformist (who will not stand against us). The rhyme and sing-song cadence sharpen the satire, suggesting a nursery-rhyme simplicity masking a bleak social truth about how admiration often follows convenience rather than virtue.