David Herbert Lawrence was an English writer whose work expresses his belief in emotion and the sexual impulse as creative and true to human nature.He was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, the son of a miner, and attended University College, Nottingham. He first became a teacher. In 1912 he embarked on a nomadic and tempestuous existence around the world that took him to Italy, Ceylon, Australia, Mexico, the United States, and other countries as well. This brought him into the company of some of the foremost writers of his times, including Bertrand Russell, Aldous and Maria Huxley, and Richard Aldington. In 1914, Lawrence married Frieda von Richthofen, ex-wife of his university professor, with whom he had run away in 1912. He suffered from tuberculosis.

Lawrence saw man as "imprisoned within his body...a mechanism grown incapable of passion." He was skeptical of bourgeois civility and the stultifying effect he believed it to have on the human spirit. He saw in the natural order a limitless potential for renewal, and saw sexuality as liberating and having generative possibilities. He believed that "creative change, creative mutation," which he sought to capture in his work, was the impulse behind all life.

His novels include the semi-autobiographical  Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1921), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). The latter was banned in the United Kingdom as obscene until 1960. He wrote poetry as well; and short stories, among them:"The Woman Who Rode Away."

Piccadilly Circus at Night
Street-Walkers.

WHEN into the night the yellow light is roused like dust above the towns,
Or like a mist the moon has kissed from off a pool in the midst of the
downs,


Our faces flower for a little hour pale and uncertain along the street,
Daisies that waken all mistaken white-spread in expectancy to meet


The luminous mist which the poor things wist was dawn arriving across the
sky,
When dawn is far behind the star the dust-lit town has driven so high.


All the birds are folded in a silent ball of sleep,
All the flowers are faded from the asphalt isle in the sea,
Only we hard-faced creatures go round and round, and keep
The shores of this innermost ocean alive and illusory.


Wanton sparrows that twittered when morning looked in at their eyes
And the Cyprian's pavement-roses are gone, and now it is we
Flowers of illusion who shine in our gauds, make a Paradise
On the shores of this ceaseless ocean, gay birds of the town-dark sea.

Lawrence, D. H. 1919. New Poems

Winter in the Boulevard

THE frost has settled down upon the trees
And ruthlessly strangled off the fantasies
Of leaves that have gone unnoticed, swept like old
Romantic stories now no more to be told.


The trees down the boulevard stand naked in thought,
Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caught
In the grim undertow; naked the trees confront
Implacable winter's long, cross-questioning brunt.


Has some hand balanced more leaves in the depths of the twigs?
Some dim little efforts placed in the threads of the birch?--
It is only the sparrows, like dead black leaves on the sprigs,
Sitting huddled against the cerulean, one flesh with their perch.


The clear, cold sky coldly bethinks itself.
Like vivid thought the air spins bright, and all
Trees, birds, and earth, arrested in the after-thought
Awaiting the sentence out from the welkin brought.

Lawrence, D. H. 1919. New Poems

In Church

IN the choir the boys are singing the hymn.
        The morning light on their lips
Moves in silver-moist flashes, in musical trim.


Sudden outside the high window, one crow
        Hangs in the air
And lights on a withered oak-tree's top of woe.


One bird, one blot, folded and still at the top
        Of the withered tree!--in the grail
Of crystal heaven falls one full black drop.


Like a soft full drop of darkness it seems to sway
        In the tender wine
Of our Sabbath, suffusing our sacred day.

Lawrence, D. H. 1919. New Poems.

Ballad of Another Ophelia

OH the green glimmer of apples in the orchard,
Lamps in a wash of rain!
Oh the wet walk of my brown hen through the stackyard,
Oh tears on the window pane!


Nothing now will ripen the bright green apples,
Full of disappointment and of rain,
Brackish they will taste, of tears, when the yellow dapples
Of autumn tell the withered tale again.


All round the yard it is cluck, my brown hen,
Cluck, and the rain-wet wings,
Cluck, my marigold bird, and again
Cluck for your yellow darlings.


For the grey rat found the gold thirteen
Huddled away in the dark,
Flutter for a moment, oh the beast is quick and keen,
Extinct one yellow-fluffy spark.


Once I had a lover bright like running water,
Once his face was laughing like the sky;
Open like the sky looking down in all its laughter
On the buttercups, and the buttercups was I.


What, then, is there hidden in the skirts of all the blossom?
What is peeping from your wings, oh mother hen?
'Tis the sun who asks the question, in a lovely haste for wisdom;
What a lovely haste for wisdom is in men!


Yea, but it is cruel when undressed is all the blossom,
And her shift is lying white upon the floor,
That a grey one, like a shadow, like a rat, a thief, a rain-storm,
Creeps upon her then and gathers in his store.


Oh the grey garner that is full of half-grown apples,
Oh the golden sparkles laid extinct!
And oh, behind the cloud-sheaves, like yellow autumn dapples,
Did you see the wicked sun that winked!

Lawrence, D. H. 1916. Amores

Dreams Old

I have opened the window to warm my hands on the sill
Where the sunlight soaks in the stone: the afternoon
Is full of dreams, my love, the boys are all still
In a wistful dream of Lorna Doone.


The clink of the shunting engines is sharp and fine,
Like savage music striking far off, and there
On the great, uplifted blue palace, lights stir and shine
Where the glass is domed in the blue, soft air.


There lies the world, my darling, full of wonder and wistfulness and
strange
Recognition and greetings of half-acquaint things, as I greet the cloud
Of blue palace aloft there, among misty indefinite dreams that range
At the back of my life's horizon, where the dreamings of past lives crowd.


Over the nearness of Norwood Hill, through the mellow veil
Of the afternoon glows to me the old romance of David and Dora,
With the old, sweet, soothing tears, and laughter that shakes the sail
Of the ship of the soul over seas where dreamed dreams lure the unoceaned
explorer.


All the bygone, hush and graved years
Streaming back where the mist distils
Into forgetfulness: soft-sailing waters where fears
No longer shake, where the silk sail fills
With an unfelt breeze that ebbs over the seas, where the storm
Of living has passed, on and on
Through the coloured iridescence that swims in the warm
Wake of the tumult now spent and gone,
Drifts my boat, wistfully lapsing after
The mists of vanishing tears and the echo of laughter.

Lawrence, D. H. 1916. Amores

Grey Evening

WHEN you went, how was it you carried with you
My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours?
My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers,
And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue?


Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped
Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields
Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped
And garnered that the golden daylight yields.


Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among
The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk,
As farther off the scythe of night is swung,
And little stars come rolling from their husk.


And all the earth is gone into a dust
Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold,
Covered with aged lichens, past with must,
And all the sky has withered and gone cold.


And so I sit and scan the book of grey,
Feeling the shadows like a blind man reading,
All fearful lest I find the last words bleeding
With wounds of sunset and the dying day.

Lawrence, D. H. 1916. Amores