Poem of the Week

[Scheherazade]

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Let's try it again, shall we?

* Please post a new poem only on a Friday (please wait till it is Friday in your corner of the world).

* The same person cannot post another poem within the same month.

* When you participate in this thread, just like others on the Forum, be prepared that there will be opinions which are different from yours. We are not here to persuade others or to make them think like ourselves but simply to share our own interpretations and views with each other.

*Any off topic posts are likely to be edited/deleted.

For May 19 - 25:


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.

-D.H. Lawrence

[blp]

Well, I had to go to Parson's Green in Fulham (South West London) yesterday and this is pretty much how I always feel about the people I see around there. I find this rather unpoetic however. The only thing that really seems to make it like a poem, other than the line breaks, is the repeated phrase, 'How beastly the bourgeois is'. There are therefore zillions of poems I prefer as poems to this, but the sentiment's good. I'd like to have seen him turn this into a short prose rant.

[Virgil]

As someone who has studied Lawarence, I have always wondered why this poem gets so much distribution in anthologies. I agree with blp, it is not a great poem. When Lawrence gets preachy, which he has a tendency to do, it degenerates into stuff like this. Some day I'll post a good Lawrence poem to show he really is a good poet. From this poem, though, you can see the characteristic Lawrencian lines, which owe great debt to Walt Whitman. There are some things I like here, the fact that the narrator is analyzing a "specimen", which dove-tails with Lawrence's ideas of the modern world and the bourgeouis as the representative of the modern world. [BTW, he was not a Marxist, if you draw that conclusion. He was actually sympatheitc to the dictators of the early 20th century.]

I do happen to like this passage though:

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.

[Petrarch's Love]

I agree with Virg., both that I don't think it's the best example of Lawrence's poetry, and that the last few stanzas are the best, especially the ones he quoted. I have to admit I've met a few specimans in my time who quite destinctly resemble this sort of fungus among us, which makes this piece pretty humorous. Lawrence has a good ear, and I like the sound and flow of his language, but I'll agree with the other remarks that it's one of those poems that's treading the fine line between poetry and really poetic prose.

[Bandini]

I like that fine line and I like Lawrence; well his work - he was pretty much an arse wasn't he? It is fairly poetic - effective imagery? Not his greatest poem though.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

As I mentioned elsewhere, my parents live close to Lawrence's birthplace. So I grew up with his poetry. This is not among his best, but it does have his voice. He was opinionated, often downright nasty, and that shows here. I much prefer his dialect poems though.

[Bandini]

He was opinionated, often downright nasty, and that shows here.

I find it fascinating how he could portray his friends in stories so obviously and so negatively and really not feel any shame! I read a biography by Brenda Maddox a couple of years ago that was quite interesting. I like his nature poems - you can really see the influence on Hughes there too.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

I've always loved 'The Mosquito'. One of the few poems I studied at school that I actually liked (probably because the little bastits like my veins so much! )

[Scheherazade]

I find it fascinating how he could portray his friends in stories so obviously and so negatively and really not feel any shame!

I found this while looking for this poem:

The [characters in Women in Love are probably partially based on Lawrence and his wife, and John Middleton Murray and his wife Katherine Mansfield. The friends shared a house in England in 1914-15. Lawrence used the English composer and songwriter Philip Heseltine as the basis for Julius Halliday, who never forgave it. When a manuscript of philosophical essays by Lawrence fell into Heseltine's hands - no other copies of the text existed - he used it as toilet tissue. According to an anecdote, Lawrence never trusted the opinions of Murray and when Murray told that he believed that there was no God, Lawrence replied, "Now I know there is."

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dhlawren.htm

I agree that as a poem, this is a not a good specimen, however, I like reading it because it has a tongue-in-cheek feel to it and it reflects Lawrence's personality nicely. I like the mushroom simile very much too... Reminded me of Plath's 'Mushrooms'... proves that imagery can be used to serve many different purposes, I guess!

[jackyyyy]

Its a GREAT poem... if you're an anarchist, a conservative-anarchist.

[Virgil]

I find it fascinating how he could portray his friends in stories so obviously and so negatively and really not feel any shame! I read a biography by Brenda Maddox a couple of years ago that was quite interesting. I like his nature poems - you can really see the influence on Hughes there too.

The negative portraying of his friends is quite true, and unfortuantely Lawrence had a real nasty streak in him. But he was also extremely admired and loved by many people, ironically mostly women.

I agree that as a poem, this is a not a good specimen, however, I like reading it because it has a tongue-in-cheek feel to it and it reflects Lawrence's personality nicely.

It does. But his personality seems to come through in everything he writes.

[jackyyyy]

Got to take your hat off to someone who just says it. How about this for personality:

A Sane Revolution

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
Don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
Don't do it in deadly earnest,
Do it for fun.

[blp]

Got to take your hat off to someone who just says it. How about this for personality:

A Sane Revolution

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
Don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
Don't do it in deadly earnest,
Do it for fun.

Could so easily be the credo of another conservative anarchist, Auberon Waugh.

If everyone can forgive me drawing attention to my own work for a mo', I can't help being struck by the parallel between Lawrence's comparison of a bourgeois Englishman with funghi and my own lines, in the poem that annoyed Virgil so much a while back, comparing the English to mushrooms.

[Virgil]

If everyone can forgive me drawing attention to my own work for a mo', I can't help being struck by the parallel between Lawrence's comparison of a bourgeois Englishman with funghi and my own lines, in the poem that annoyed Virgil so much a while back, comparing the English to mushrooms.

You're almost right. I was about to agree with you, but then the differences came to me. If I remember correctly about you're poem, and I'm going by memory here, you did two things in your poem that Lawrence doesn't do in his that led me to feel it smacked of racism.
(1) You provided a context where you described what you see as an odd shape to an English head. This contains genetic overtones.
(2) You generalized all english while Lawrence is specific about a cultural element. All english versuses the banker across the street, if you will, is different.

[rachel]

Well I like this poem. When I used to visit my adopted grandpapa in the deep south of the United States, every moment of life was according to protocol for he was of wealth and high standing. I couldn't even allow freckles to come on my face without being bathed in buttermilk and made to feel like a freak. And the ladies didn't get tanned because it smacked too m uch of the servants dark skin. So the lines:
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.

These lines perfectly describe what I saw daily. I didn't feel at all like Lawrence about the people, I understood them and even as a child felt the need to protect the older ones who were decaying slowly and were honestly terrified if some alien thing touched their faerie place and their faerie minds. They all seemed so fragile like the honeysuckle that grew in abundance, soft like the snow white bread fresh from the ovens daily in their kitchens. They were exotic in a wet way like mint julip drinks and yet I loved them dearly.