Grey Evening

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



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.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 20, 2023

48 sec read
58

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABBA CDCD EFEF GHGH IJJI
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 892
Words 163
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4

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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    Who wrote the poem ״Invictus״?
    A William Ernest Henley
    B Oscar Wilde
    C Thomas Hardy
    D Sylvia Plath