Malade

David Herbert Lawrence 1885 (Eastwood, Nottinghamshire) – 1930 (Vence)



The sick grapes on the chair by the bed lie prone; at the window
The tassel of the blind swings gently, tapping the pane,  
As a little wind comes in.  
The room is the hollow rind of a fruit, a gourd
Scooped out and dry, where a spider,
Folded in its legs as in a bed,  
Lies on the dust, watching where is nothing to see but twilight and walls.
 
And if the day outside were mine! What is the day  
But a grey cave, with great grey spider-cloths hanging  
Low from the roof, and the wet dust falling softly from them
Over the wet dark rocks, the houses, and over  
The spiders with white faces, that scuttle on the floor of the cave!
I am choking with creeping, grey confinedness.  
 
But somewhere birds, beside a lake of light, spread wings
Larger than the largest fans, and rise in a stream upwards
And upwards on the sunlight that rains invisible,  
So that the birds are like one wafted feather,  
Small and ecstatic suspended over a vast spread country.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

54 sec read
72

Quick analysis:

Scheme XXXXAXB XXXAXB XXXAX
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 950
Words 180
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 7, 6, 5

David Herbert Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Lawrence's writing explores issues such as sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage". At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the literary critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness. more…

All David Herbert Lawrence poems | David Herbert Lawrence Books

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