Professional Documents
Culture Documents
David Herbert Lawrence
David Herbert Lawrence
(1881-1930)
Work
- The White Peacock (1911)
- The Trespasser (1912)
- Sons and Lovers (1913)
- The Rainbow (1915)
- The Lost Girl (1920)
- Women in Love (1920)
- Aaron’s Rod (1922)
- Kangaroo (1923)
- The Boy in the Bush (1924)
- The Plumed Serpent (1925)
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
- The Escaped Cock (1929)
- The Woman Who Rode Away and Other
Stories (1928)
- Love Among the Haystacks and Other
Stories (1930)
- more short stories, essays, articles, poems,
plays, travel books
Conclusion
- the writer does not propose the annihilation
of the dark forces within, but the wise
balance within the individual
- this explains the rich symbolic and
metaphoric substratum in his prose
- he insists on the reconciliation between
feeling and thought: feeling and intellect
should be given equal chances
- in his work he endeavored to awaken his
fellow-beings to new feelings
- the major conflicts of his protagonists
derive from the clash between personal
needs and social background
- Lawrence was not appreciated at his real
value during his lifetime by the majority of
writers and critics, and was accused of
vulgarity, obscenity, even pornography
- Conversely, E.M. Forster considered him
the most important contemporary writer
- A. Huxley too appreciated his work, as a
proof of respect he collected and published
many of his letters.
Green
D.H.L.
The dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone
For the first time, now for the first time seen.
Self-Pity
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
Humming Bird
I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and
hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.
Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent
stems.
I believe there were no flowers, then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead
of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his
long beak.
Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the long
telescope of Time,
Luckily for us.
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.