Virgin Youth

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



Now and again
All my body springs alive,
And the life that is polarised in my eyes,
That quivers between my eyes and mouth,
Flies like a wild thing across my body,
Leaving my eyes half-empty, and clamorous,
Filling my still breasts with a flush and a flame,
Gathering the soft ripples below my breast
Into urgent, passionate waves,  
And my soft, slumbering belly
Quivering awake with one impulse of desire,
Gathers itself fiercely together;  
And my docile, fluent arms  
Knotting themselves with wild strength
To clasp—what they have never clasped.
Then I tremble, and go trembling
Under the wild, strange tyranny of my body,
Till it has spent itself,  
And the relentless nodality of my eyes reasserts itself,
Till the bursten flood of life ebbs back to my eyes,
Back from my beautiful, lonely body  
Tired and unsatisfied.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

42 sec read
122

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCDECFGHEIIJKLMENNCEO
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 816
Words 141
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 22

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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