Cook ends this stanza with an indictment: society denies both material gain ("profit") and emotional fulfillment ("pleasure") to the laboring class. She ends by humanizing the worker to remind society that workers are people too.

In poems that protested the oppression of the working class, domesticity and 'feminine labor' was often left out of the discussion; however, Cook appeals to both men and women in her poem. This results in a wider audience being included in the narrative, and leads to a larger group speaking out against their oppressors.

This stanza is repeated twice throughout the poem. The sarcastic tone and the repetition of the stanza emphasizes Cook's message. She gives life to the worker and encourages work while also suggesting the workers stand up for themselves. A "minute gun" is a gun that fires every minute, so Cooke is encouraging the working class not to be silent about the injustices they face.

From the Oxford English Dictionary: (noun) A mean, stingy, or parsimonious person; a miser; a person who only grudgingly parts with, spends, or uses up anything. Also in extended use with reference to emotion, etc.

Here Cook compares the working class to worker bees having their hard work, honey, stolen from them. Similarly, the working class is being taken advantage of by people who keep getting richer while the laborers toil away.

In the article ""Of "Haymakers" and "City Artisans": The Chartist Poetics of Eliza Cook's "Songs of Labor,"" Solveig Robinson states: "Cook uses the Chartist trope of the domestic slave and a string of rhetorical questions to challenge the effects of unregulated labor, not only on the workers themselves, but on the society as a whole."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40002678

From the OED: a gun fired at intervals of a minute, esp. at a funeral.

Cook uses this as an analogy for how often workers and laborers must voice their concerns before their employers will listen to them.

The "reeking brow" Cook mentions is a reference to the sweat on a worker's brow. This serves as a metaphor comparing sweat to pearls which elevates work to a royal adornment. This bypasses the levels of traditional hierarchy by location national wealth in workers' bodies.

Each stanza follows a specific rhyming pattern. In each stanza, the end words of the first and third lines rhyme and the second and fourth also rhyme. The rhyme scheme of the poem results in an up-beat cadence when the poem is read aloud. The cadence really juxtaposes the serious tone of the content.