The Cop and the Anthem by O. Henry
Quick answer: The Cop and the Anthem by O. Henry: full summary with the ironic ending, Soapy's six failed schemes, themes of fate and society, and the story's comic craft.
Winter is coming to New York, and Soapy, a homeless man on a Madison Square bench, has chosen his resort for the season: three months of board and bed on Blackwell's Island, courtesy of a jail sentence he now needs to earn. The Cop and the Anthem, from O. Henry's 1906 collection The Four Million, follows one man's diligent attempts to get arrested in a city that refuses to oblige him. It is the funniest of O. Henry's famous stories, and its ending is the cruellest joke he ever told gently.
The story survives on syllabuses because it manages two things at once. It is a comic catalogue, six schemes, six failures, each funnier than the last, and it is a social document, a portrait of a city where the law is arbitrary, respectability is a costume, and a man can be punished precisely once he stops deserving it. Students need the irony; writers should come for the structure.
The story in brief
Soapy's plan is simple: commit a minor offence, get arrested, and winter warmly on Blackwell's Island, which he prefers to charity's price of humiliation. Execution proves harder than design. He tries to dine grandly at a fine restaurant and walk out unpaid, but the head waiter reads his broken shoes and frayed trousers at the door and turns him away. He smashes a shop window with a cobblestone and waits for the law, but the policeman refuses to believe a vandal would stand there chatting, and chases a man running for a car instead. A modest restaurant lets him eat his fill, then declines to call a cop and simply has two waiters pitch him onto the pavement. He poses as a masher, accosting a young woman in front of a policeman, and she turns out to be no victim at all: she takes his arm cheerfully and Soapy flees. He plays the disorderly drunk, howling on the pavement, and the officer dismisses it as a college boy celebrating a football victory, under orders to leave such noise alone. Finally he lifts a well-dressed man's silk umbrella, only for the owner to stammer that he himself picked it up in a restaurant that morning, and surrender it to Soapy without a fight.
Defeated, Soapy drifts toward his bench. But near a quiet corner stands an old church, and through a violet window comes an organist practising the Sunday anthem, music Soapy knew in the years when his life held mothers and roses and clean thoughts. The anthem, the moon and the old street work a sudden change in him: he sees with horror what he has become, and resolves, tonight, to be a man again, to find work in the morning and pull himself out of the mire. At that exact moment a policeman finds him standing there, asks what he is doing, and arrests him for loitering. In the morning, the magistrate sentences him: three months on the Island. The prayer he abandoned is answered on the instant he stopped praying it.
The characters
Soapy carries the whole story. He is a tramp with the soul of a gentleman planner, proud enough to prefer prison's honest price to philanthropy's inspections, articulate, methodical and unlucky with the precision of a man in a fable. The rest of the cast are the city itself in uniform and out of it: policemen who see what they expect, waiters who guard class borders at the door, a woman and an umbrella man who are both less respectable than they look. Nobody in the story is quite what their clothes claim, which is the point, and the church organist, unseen, is the one character who changes anything.
Themes and meaning
The exam headline is situational irony: when Soapy wants arrest, he cannot buy it; the moment he chooses reform, arrest is free. Under that sits a critique of institutional justice, which in this story punishes presence, not conduct, and reads guilt off clothing and location. The failed schemes also sketch a city of universal small fraud, the respectable umbrella thief and the unrespectable woman, where surfaces rule and the law polices appearances. The anthem scene adds the theme of memory and redemption, the past reaching a man through music when argument never could.
The sharper observation: every scheme fails because someone refuses to see Soapy as a criminal, and the final arrest succeeds because someone refuses to see him as anything else. The verdict never once depends on what Soapy actually does. That symmetry is the story's real indictment, and it is why the comic and social readings are the same reading: the joke and the injustice share a single mechanism.
The craft: the rule of six and the swerve
Structurally the story is a catalogue plot: one goal, six attempts, escalating absurdity, each episode a self-contained joke with its own reversal. Note the variety discipline: no two failures fail the same way, blocked entry, disbelief, private justice, a counter-predator, a police policy, a guilty victim, so repetition never sets in. Writers building episodic comedy should steal that checklist logic, making every failure teach something new about the world rather than merely delaying the ending.
Then comes the swerve, and it is worth close study. The anthem scene changes register completely, from brisk comic prose to something hushed and lyrical, and the story lets the mood hold just long enough to be believed before the trap closes. The twist obeys the story's own established law, that outcomes ignore intentions, so the ending is both a shock and a confirmation. That is the O. Henry standard worth internalising: a surprise that the whole story has secretly been proving. The final cut to the magistrate's one-line sentence, with no protest and no commentary, shows the value of ending a beat early and letting the silence do the arithmetic.
What poets can take from this
- List the six schemes in order for exams; examiners reward candidates who can show the escalation rather than just name the irony.
- Define the double irony precisely: arrest denied to the willing criminal, granted to the reformed man doing nothing.
- Use the umbrella owner and the young woman as evidence that respectability in the story is costume, not character.
- Cite the anthem as the agent of change: memory through music succeeds where hunger and cold changed nothing.
- Writers: in episodic plots, make each failure reveal a different rule of the world, and keep the count between four and six.
- Practise the register swerve: sustained comedy, one lyrical beat, then the coldest possible last line.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character methodically tries to achieve a small institutional outcome, getting fired, getting a refund, getting deported from a queue, and fails five times for five different revealing reasons. Then let the character sincerely give up and change, and have the outcome arrive at that exact moment, unwanted.
Questions
What is the irony in The Cop and the Anthem?
Soapy spends the whole story trying to get arrested and fails six times, yet the moment he resolves to reform and build an honest life, a policeman arrests him for doing nothing at all. The outcome he chased arrives only when he no longer wants it.
What happens at the end of The Cop and the Anthem?
Moved by an anthem drifting from an old church, Soapy decides to find work and become a man again. A policeman immediately arrests him for loitering, and the next morning a magistrate sentences him to three months on Blackwell's Island, the very term he had been seeking all along.
Why does Soapy want to go to prison?
Winter is coming and Blackwell's Island promises three months of food, shelter and warmth. Soapy prefers jail to charity because charity, in his view, charges the poor in humiliation and interrogation, while the law's price is plain and impersonal.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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