Blog Archives
A Short Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Tickets, Please’
On Lawrence’s classic short story about the war between the sexes
‘Tickets, Please’ was first published in 1918, while the First World War was still raging. But D. H. Lawrence’s short story of love, sex, betrayal, and vengeance is set on the home front rather than the western front, and centres on the battle of the sexes rather than the horrific conflict in northern France and Belgium. You can read ‘Tickets, Please’ here.
In summary, ‘Tickets, Please’ is a story about a man who works on the trams of Nottingham during the First World War. John Thomas – his very name is slang for the ‘male member’, or penis – is a cock of the walk, a jack the lad, a man who thinks he has it all. Curiously, though, this is 1918 and he’s not ‘at the front’: he’s not fighting in the war. Why? Lawrence doesn’t tell us, but it raises interesting questions. Does this cast a shadow over his ‘manliness’? Read the rest of this entry
The Stuffed Owl: Some of the Worst Poems Ever Published
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle pores over some poetry that’s so bad it’s good
A short while ago, I wrote about Nicholas T. Parsons’ very witty and erudite study of poetasters, The Joy of Bad Verse
In his preface to the first edition of The Stuffed Owl, D. B. Wyndham Lewis points out that ‘Bad Verse has its canons, like Good Verse’, and that the selection of the ‘best’ bad verse is a task as onerous and difficult as the challenge of choosing the cream of the crop for inclusion in a ‘traditional’ anthology. Bad verse in itself is not amusing or entertaining, and verse that is bad in such a way as to be distinctive is hard to come by. Indeed, he goes on to argue that ‘good Bad Verse has an eerie, Read the rest of this entry
A Short Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Discord in Childhood’
On Lawrence’s short poem about childhood
The novelist, short-story writer, and poet D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) had a curious relationship with trees. He reportedly liked the climb mulberry trees in the nude to stimulate his imagination. And trees loom large in his work. In ‘Discord in Childhood’, an early poem which he began writing in 1909 when Lawrence was still only in his mid-twenties, Lawrence uses the ash-tree to suggest the discordant relationship between the tree’s supposed healing properties (it was supposed to play a valuable role in children’s health) and the suffering endured by a child listening to its parents arguing.
Discord in Childhood
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 Read the rest of this entry
