27
Aug
D.H. Lawrence Poems
Published by Jeanna

While D.H. Lawrence is known to modern audiences primarily as a novelist and short story writer, the author’s initial forays into literature were his poems.

Born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1885, David Herbert Lawrence’s childhood was spent around the colleries of the Eastwood area, where his father and most of the other men in his family worked as miners. Although Lawrence received a scholarship to attend a local high school, he dropped out to work as a factory clerk. His friendship with Jessie Chambers, who tutored him and encouraged his writing, saved Lawrence from a career clerking and instead set him upon the path to teaching.

By 1911, Lawrence’s health was suffering due to recurring bouts of pneumonia. He quit teaching and eloped to Europe with Frieda Weekley, the German-born wife of a professor in Nottingham.

Lawrence’s eventual marriage to Weekley did nothing to stem the controversy that surrounded the couple. As they traveled about Europe, they encountered both intolerance of their unusual lifestyle, and, as World War I began, discrimination against Weekley due to her German birth. They traveled to such exotic locales as Ceylon, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Mexico before settling in the United States in Taos, New Mexico for a time.

The fact that he’d eloped with a married woman was only one of the more unusual facets of Lawrence’s personality that would affect both his personal life and his writing. His radical views on sex, psychology, and even nature influenced his lifestyle – which at one time included a group of female followers who quarreled and competed for his favors – and his work. His novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and his collection of poetry Pansies (1929) were both banned in England for their sexual content, and would remain banned for decades. Incidentally, Lawrence’s writing was not the only cause for controversy – a London gallery displaying his paintings was raided and his paintings seized.

Lawrence and Weekley continued to travel the world, motivated both by a desire to escape the controversies and troubles that swirled around them, but also in a desperate attempt to find some sort of relief for the “bronchials” that Lawrence suffered with throughout his life. The “bronchials” were, in actuality, tuberculosis, although Lawrence refused to acknowledge his suffering as such. However, by the late 1920s it was obvious to all who were close to Lawrence that tuberculosis had ravaged his health. Lawrence died from the disease in France in 1930.

Poems By D.H. Lawrence:

How Beastly the Bourgeois Is

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Presentable, eminently presentable--
shall I make you a present of him?

Isn\'t he handsome? Isn\'t he healthy? Isn\'t he a fine specimen?
Doesn\'t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn\'t it God\'s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn\'t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
thing

Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man\'s need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable--
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
than his own.

And even so, he\'s stale, he\'s been there too long.
Touch him, and you\'ll find he\'s all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty--
How beastly the bourgeois is!

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
England
what a pity they can\'t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

Trees in the Garden

Ah in the thunder air
how still the trees are!

And the lime-tree, lovely and tall, every leaf silent
hardly looses even a last breath of perfume.

And the ghostly, creamy coloured little tree of leaves
white, ivory white among the rambling greens
how evanescent, variegated elder, she hesitates on the green grass
as if, in another moment, she would disappear
with all her grace of foam!

And the larch that is only a column, it goes up too tall to see:
and the balsam-pines that are blue with the grey-blue blueness of
things from the sea,
and the young copper beech, its leaves red-rosy at the ends
how still they are together, they stand so still
in the thunder air, all strangers to one another
as the green grass glows upwards, strangers in the silent garden.

Lichtental

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
