By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Self-Pity’ is one of the shortest poems D. H. Lawrence ever wrote, but it’s worth sharing here (with a few brief words of analysis) because, unlike Sons and Lovers or a poem like ‘Snake’, it is not as well-known among his oeuvre. The poem fills barely a third of a page in his The Complete Poems (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
Self-Pity
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.