"When the Whistle Blows" is a poem by L. Frank Baum. It was included in Baum's 1898 collection By the Candelabra's Glare, and later reprinted in L. Frank Baum's Juvenile Speaker (1910) and its successors. The poem is short, only 16 lines in two stanzas; yet it is noteworthy for its working-class viewpoint, uncommon in the author's canon as a whole. The blowing whistle of the title is the factory whistle that signals the end of the working day; and the poem celebrates release from toil — "So the workman goes / To his home with joyful heart / When the whistle blows."