Selected Poems

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Nottinghamshire in 1885. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911. The next year Lawrence published Sons and Lovers and ran off to Germany with Frieda Weekley, his former tutor's wife. His masterpieces The Rainbow and Women in Love were completed in quick succession, but the first was suppressed as indecent and the second was not published until 1920. Lawrence's lyrical writings challenged convention, promoting a return to an ideal of nature where sex is seen as a sacrament. In 1925 Lawrence's final novel, Lady Chatterly's Lover, was banned in England and the United States for indecency. He died of tuberculosis in 1930 in Venice.

James Fenton was born in Lincoln in 1949 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. He has worked as political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondence, foreign correspondent and columnist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was Oxford Professor of Poetry for the period 1994-99.

Selected PoemsChronology
Introduction
Further Reading

From Love Poems and Others (1913)

Cherry Robbers
Bei Hennef
Violets
Whether or Not
The Collier's Wife
The Drained Cup
A Snowy Day in School
The Best of School
Last Lesson of the Afternoon

From Amores (1916)

The Wild Common
Discord in Childhood
Weeknight Service
A Winter's Tale
Discipline
Scent of Irises
Last Words to Miriam
Endless Anxiety
At the Window
Sorrow
Brooding Grief
Malade

From Look! We Have Come Through! (1917)

She Looks Back
On the Balcony
Frohnleichnam
A Young Wife
River Roses
Gloire de Dijon
A Youth Mowing
Misery
Meeting among the Mountains
Spring Morning

From New Poems (1918)

Coming Awake
Letter from Town: The Almond-Tree
Thief in the Night
Twofold
Piccadilly Circus at Night: Street-Walkers
Piano

From Bay (1919)

Bombardment
Winter-Lull
Shades
Ruination
Nostalgia

Tortoises (1921)

Baby Tortoise
Tortoise Shell
Tortoise Family Connections
Lui et Elle
Tortoise Gallantry
Tortoise Shout

From Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923)

Pomegranate
Peach
Medlars and Sorb-Apples
Figs
Grapes
Peace
Cypresses
Bare Fig-Trees
Bare Almond-Trees
Almond Blossom
Purple Anemones
Sicilian Cyclamens
The Mosquito
Bat
Man and Bat
Snake
Turkey-Cock
Humming-Bird
Eagle in New Mexico
The Ass

From Pansies (1929)

How Beastly the Bourgeois Is
Swan
The Noble Englishman
Good Husbands Make Unhappy Wives
The Elephant is Slow to Mate
Self-Pity
The Mess of Love
Red-Herring
The Little Wowser
To Women, as Far as I'm Concerned
Can't Be Borne
Basta!
Lizard
Conundrums
The Saddest Day

From Last Poems (1932)

The Greeks are Coming!
The Argonauts
Middle of the World
Maximus
Butterfly
Bavarian Gentians
The Ship of Death

From More Pansies (1932)

Image-Making Love
The Emotional Friend
Intimates
The Uprooted
In a Spanish Tram-Car
Trees in the Garden
Storm in the Black Forest
Lord Tennyson and Lord Melchett
The White Horse

Appendix: Lawrence on Poetry
Poetry of the Present
Whitman (from Studies in Classic American Literature (1923))
Foreword to Collected Poems (1928)