Afternoon in School

The Last Lesson

By D.H. Lawrence

(Also published as ``Last Lesson of the Afternoon'')

When will the bell ring, and end this weariness? How long have they tugged the leash, and strained apart My pack of unruly hounds: I cannot start Them again on a quarry of knowledge they hate to hunt, I can haul them and urge them no more. No more can I endure to bear the brunt Of the books that lie out on the desks: a full three score Of several insults of blotted pages and scrawl Of slovenly work that they have offered me. I am sick, and tired more than any thrall Upon the woodstacks working weariedly. And shall I take The last dear fuel and heap it on my soul Till I rouse my will like a fire to consume Their dross of indifference, and burn the scroll Of their insults in punishment? - I will not! I will not waste myself to embers for them, Not all for them shall the fires of my life be hot, For myself a heap of ashes of weariness, till sleep Shall have raked the embers clear: I will keep Some of my strength for myself, for if I should sell It all for them, I should hate them—I will sit and wait for the bell.

D. H. Lawrence

Letter from Town: On a Grey Morning in March

The clouds are pushing in grey reluctance slowly northward to you,

While north of them all, at the farthest ends, stands one bright-bosomed, aglance

With fire as it guards the wild north cloud-coasts, red-fire seas running through

The rocks where ravens flying to windward melt as a well-shot lance.

You should be out by the orchard, where violets secretly darken the earth,

Or there in the woods of the twilight, with northern wind-flowers shaken astir.

Think of me here in the library, trying and trying a song that is worth

Tears and swords to my heart, arrows no armour will turn or deter.

You tell me the lambs have come, they lie like daisies white in the grass

Of the dark-green hills; new calves in shed; peewits turn after the plough –

It is well for you. For me the navvies work in the road where I pass

And I want to smite in anger the barren rock of each waterless brow.

Like the sough of a wind that is caught up high in the mesh of the budding trees,

A sudden car goes sweeping past, and I strain my soul to hear

The voice of the furtive triumphant engine as it rushes past like a breeze,

To hear on its mocking triumphance unwitting the after-echo of fear.

D. H. Lawrence

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.

D. H. Lawrence

Mutilation

A thick mist-sheet lies over the broken wheat.

I walk up to my neck in mist, holding my mouth up.

Across there, a discoloured moon burns itself out.

I hold the night in horror;

I dare not turn round.

To-night I have left her alone.

They would have it I have left her for ever.

Oh my God, how it aches

Where she is cut off from me!

Perhaps she will go back to England.

Perhaps she will go back,

Perhaps we are parted for ever.

If I go on walking through the whole breadth of Germany

I come to the North Sea, or the Baltic.

Over there is Russia - Austria, Switzerland, France, in a circle!

I here in the undermist on the Bavarian road.

It aches in me.

What is England or France, far off,

But a name she might take?

I don't mind this continent stretching, the sea far away;

It aches in me for her

Like the agony of limbs cut off and aching;

Not even longing,

It is only agony.

A cripple!

Oh God, to be mutilated!

To be a cripple!

And if I never see her again?

I think, if they told me so

I could convulse the heavens with my horror.

I think I could alter the frame of things in my agony.

I think I could break the System with my heart.

I think, in my convulsion, the skies would break.

She too suffers.

But who could compel her, if she chose me against them all?

She has not chosen me finally, she suspends her choice.

Night folk, Tuatha De Danaan, dark Gods, govern her sleep,

Magnificent ghosts of the darkness, carry off her decision in sleep,

Leave her no choice, make her lapse me-ward, make her,

Oh Gods of the living Darkness, powers of Night.

WOLFRATSHAUSEN

D. H. Lawrence

People

The great gold apples of night

Hang from the street's long bough

Dripping their light

On the faces that drift below,

On the faces that drift and blow

Down the night-time, out of sight

In the wind's sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night

Distilling over me

Makes sickening the white

Ghost-flux of faces that hie

Them endlessly, endlessly by

Without meaning or reason why

They ever should be.

D. H. Lawrence

Rose of All the World

I am here myself; as though this heave of effort

At starting other life, fulfilled my own;

Rose-leaves that whirl in colour round a core

Of seed-specks kindled lately and softly blown

By all the blood of the rose-bush into being –

Strange, that the urgent will in me, to set

My mouth on hers in kisses, and so softly

To bring together two strange sparks, beget

Another life from our lives, so should send

The innermost fire of my own dim soul out-spinning

And whirling in blossom of flame and being upon me!

That my completion of manhood should be the beginning

Another life from mine! For so it looks.

The seed is purpose, blossom accident.

The seed is all in all, the blossom lent

To crown the triumph of this new descent.

Is that it, woman? Does it strike you so?

The Great Breath blowing a tiny seed of fire

Fans out your petals for excess of flame,

Till all your being smokes with fine desire?

Or are we kindled, you and I, to be

One rose of wonderment upon the tree

Of perfect life, and is our possible seed

But the residuum of the ecstasy?

How will you have it? - the rose is all in all,

Or the ripe rose-fruits of the luscious fall?

The sharp begetting, or the child begot?

Our consummation matters, or does it not?

To me it seems the seed is just left over

From the red rose-flowers' fiery transience;

Just orts and slarts; berries that smoulder in the bush

Which burnt just now with marvellous immanence.

Blossom, my darling, blossom, be a rose

Of roses unchidden and purposeless; a rose

For rosiness only, without an ulterior motive;

For me it is more than enough if the flower unclose.

D. H. Lawrence

Extracts from D. H. Lawrence's Letters

17 Jan. 1913: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what-not."

26 April 1913: "And I am so sure that only through a readjustment between men and women, and a making free and healthy of this sex, will she [England] get out of her present atrophy. Oh, Lord, and if I don't 'subdue my art to a metaphysic', as somebody very beautifully said of Hardy, I do write because I want folk -- English folk -- to alter, and have more sense."

22 April 1914: ". . . primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience. That I must keep to, because I can only work like that."

Self-Pity

I never saw a wild thing

Feel sorry for itself.

Even a bird will drop frozen dead from a bough

without ever having felt sorry for itself.

D. H. Lawrence