British, (1885-1930)
Female Coercion
- If men only fought outwards into the world
- women might be devoted and gentle.
- The fight’s got to go in some direction.
- But when men turn Willy wet-legs
- women start in to make changes;
- only instead of changing things that might be changed
- they want to change the man himself
- and turn the poor silk glove into a lusty sow’s ear.
- And the poor Willy wet-legs, the soft silk gloves,
- how they hate the women’s efforts to turn them
- into sow’s ears!
- The modern Circe-dom!
Food of the North
- The food of the north tastes too much of the fat of the pig
- fat of the pig!
- Take me south again, to the olive trees
- and oil me with the lymph of silvery trees,
- oil me with the lymph of trees
- not with the fat of the pig.
Mystic
- They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience is considered.
- So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
- the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
- and the insistence of the sun.
- All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
- Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
- and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
- like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.
- If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic, which means a liar.
- The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
- and taste nothing
- that is real.
- But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
- Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.
About the Poet
David Herbert Richards Lawrence (1885-1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization where he often confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.
Lawrence believed in writing poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Many of his best-loved poems treat the physical and inner life of plants and animals; others are bitterly satiric and express his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon society or express his radical views that sex, the primitive subconscious, and nature are cures to what he considered the evils of modern industrialized society. [adapted from wikipedia.org and poets.org, DES-11/10]