Worm Either Way

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



If you live along with all the other people
    and are just like them, and conform, and are nice
    you're just a worm --

    and if you live with all the other people
    and you don't like them and won't be like them and won't conform
    then you're just the worm that has turned,
    in either case, a worm.

    The conforming worm stays just inside the skin
    respectably unseen, and cheerfully gnaws away at the heart of life,
  making it all rotten inside.

  The unconforming worm -- that is, the worm that has turned --
  gnaws just the same, gnawing the substance out of life,
  but he insists on gnawing a little hole in the social epidermis
  and poking his head out and waving himself
  and saying: Look at me, I am not respectable,
  I do all the things the bourgeois daren't do,
  I booze and fornicate and use foul language and despise your honest man.--

  But why should the worm that has turned protest so much?
  The bonnie bonnie bourgeois goes a-whoring up back streets just the same.
  The busy busy bourgeois imbibes his little share
  just the same
  if not more.
  The pretty pretty bourgeois pinks his language just as pink
  if not pinker,
  and in private boasts his exploits even louder, if you ask me,
  than the other.
  While as to honesty, Oh look where the money lies!

  So I can't see where the worm that has turned puts anything over
  the worm that is too cunning to turn.
  On the contrary, he merely gives himself away.
  The turned worm shouts. I bravely booze!
  the other says. Have one with me!
  The turned worm boasts: I copulate!
  the unturned says: You look it.
  You're a d----- b----- b----- p----- bb-----, says the worm that's turned.
  Quite! says the other. Cuckoo!

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:34 min read
75

Quick analysis:

Scheme AXB AXCB XDX CDXXAEX XFXFXXGHGX GXXXHXXCE
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,730
Words 306
Stanzas 6
Stanza Lengths 3, 4, 3, 7, 10, 9

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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