Ron Price
01-07-2008, 11:26 AM
In the opening lines of Lady Chatterly’s Lover(1928) D.H. Lawrence writes “the cataclysm has happened; we are among the ruins; we start to build up new little habitats and to have new little hopes.” -Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, John Murray Publications Ltd., London, 1991, p.173.
We did start to build
so unostentatiously
the world did not even know.
For the building of
new little habitats,
which he tended
so lovingly
from so far away,
(as They had tended
that Force of enormous power
as best They could, back then)
seemed, by then,
by those years between the wars
was canalized
into an Administrative System,
through an Instrument
expressed in points of light,
spreading slowly,
so slowly,
in new little hopes,
during a hiatus period*
among the ruins**
with the Zeal of the Lord
leading us,
tender, green and verdant.
Ron Price
12 September1999
* the period 1921 to 1936 is often referred to as a hiatus period, a waiting period, during which the Guardian was laying the foundation for the Administrative system, a system which would canalize the international teaching program in the years after 1937.
** the ruins, of course, are the ruins after WWI.
We did start to build
so unostentatiously
the world did not even know.
For the building of
new little habitats,
which he tended
so lovingly
from so far away,
(as They had tended
that Force of enormous power
as best They could, back then)
seemed, by then,
by those years between the wars
was canalized
into an Administrative System,
through an Instrument
expressed in points of light,
spreading slowly,
so slowly,
in new little hopes,
during a hiatus period*
among the ruins**
with the Zeal of the Lord
leading us,
tender, green and verdant.
Ron Price
12 September1999
* the period 1921 to 1936 is often referred to as a hiatus period, a waiting period, during which the Guardian was laying the foundation for the Administrative system, a system which would canalize the international teaching program in the years after 1937.
** the ruins, of course, are the ruins after WWI.