i would like you to make comments on this poem by DH lawrence..it is my homework..i am a student of English teaching language in university..pls help me to analyze it..

"to the women as far as i am concerned"
The feelings I don't have I don't have.
The feeling I don't have, I won't say I have.
The feelings you say you have, you don't have.
The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.
The feelings people ought to have, they never have.
If people say they've got feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven't got them.
So if you want either of us to feel anything at all
You'd better abandon all ideas of feelings altogether

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/14/2006 09:12PM by lg.

In the introduction to "Selected Poems" Keith Sagar says that the poems in Pansies, the volume this poem comes from, are to be thought of as unpretensious flowers blooming briefly, rather jauntily, not as monuments for posterity. He called them "rag poems"

Sagar quotes Richard Hoggard as saying that in the best of them we hear "the voice of a down-to-earth, tight, bright, witty Midlander...slangy, quick,flat and direct, lively, laconic, sceptical, non-conforming, nicely bloody minded" The less successful are merely "sketches for poems"

Whether this poem is included in the first or second category I can't say. Personally I don't much like his poems.

There isn't much to analyze here. Lawrence's poems are seldom deep with hidden meanings. The repetition is used to bring home the message which I assume is for his sweetheart. The crux of what Lawrence is communicating can be found in the last three lines:

If people say they've got feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven't got them.
So if you want either of us to feel anything at all
You'd better abandon all ideas of feelings altogether

My take on this is that he's saying we often try to hide our true feelings, so it's best not to say you feel anything than to find later, that you didn't really care at all.


Les

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/14/2006 09:25PM by lg.

Ah, but is he being cynical or merely humo(u)rous? I mean, such statements are certainly not the way to win the heart (read, loins) of fair lady. And this line pretty much calls the lady a liar:

The feelings you say you have, you don't have.

Sezen, you have my sympathy. I can't regard this composition by DH Lawrence as worthy of being called a poem. Being divided into lines doesn't make it such. No rhythm, no rhyme, and not a single image. It's just a piece of pompous, provocative and mostly trite rhetoric. Any woman addressed in that way by a man would be justified in telling him to go take a long walk on a short pier.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/29/2006 02:32PM by IanB.