Analysis of Discord in Childhood

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



Outside the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips,
And at night when the wind arose, the lash of the tree  
Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship’s  
Weird rigging in a storm shrieks hideously.  

Within the house two voices arose in anger, a slender lash
Whistling delirious rage, and the dreadful sound  
Of a thick lash booming and bruising, until it drowned  
The other voice in a silence of blood, ’neath the noise of the ash.


Scheme ABAB CDDC
Poetic Form Quatrain 
Metre 1101111111001 0111010101101 10101101 11000111000 0101110010100101 100100100101 1011100100111 0101001011101101
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 443
Words 80
Sentences 3
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 4, 4
Lines Amount 8
Letters per line (avg) 42
Words per line (avg) 10
Letters per stanza (avg) 169
Words per stanza (avg) 39
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 16, 2023

24 sec read
120

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…

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