D.H.Lawrence

LINES REGARDING THE EFFECTS OF THE

WORKS OF D H LAWRENCE UPON THE

GRAND-DAUGHTER OF AN ENGLISH DUKE

This is the tale of the lady ex-wife

Pretty and pale and sharp as a knife

Lately expelled from a convent in France

Because she excelled at nefarious dance

Of inverted snobbery down in the shrubbery

Naked hob-knobbery macintosh rubbery

Extra-curricular antics furnicular

Some of them reckoned to make you quite sicular

Altogether a bit of a puke

For the grand-daughter of an English duke

I am in her grandfather’s employ

As second assistant gardeners' boy

Thinning and pruning His Grace’s hydrangeas

While singing a tune of the late Percy Grainger’s

When a taxi arrives up the drive from the train

And a pretty granddaughter steps out in the rain

Forlorn and foresworn in despair and disgrace

And yet there is scorn I declare on her face

As off she is bundled upstairs to her bed

With nothing for supper but water and bread

Confined to her room in the stygian gloom

Of a typically English late afternoon

The rain is cascading and fighting in torrents

While she is invading the writings of Lawrence

Starting with Lady Chatterley’s Lover

By battery torchlight under the cover

Stretching her toes though she knows it is lights out

When Lawrence’s prose blows her tights out

At one in the morning unable to sleep

Scratching and yawning she’s starting to creep

Her wayward way through the servants' basement

Then out through the bay of a vulnerable casement

To wander the grounds in the dark of the night

Where soon she has found the spark of a light

From the door of the gardeners' outside loo

With a heart-shaped hole to let the daylight through

But at night time it works the other way about

The heart-shaped hole lets candlelight out

I may be seen by the light of said candle

With a dodgy magazine a-cranking my handle

When she peers through the hole in the door willy-nilly

Far from thinking me silly for pulling my willy

She thinks that I’m Lady Chatterley's Mellors

One of those hairy-arsed macho fellows

She doesn’t even stop to look

But going entirely by the book

With a passionate roar and a shag of a shout

She’s smashing the door and she’s dragging me out

Yelling aloud a frenetic proposal

That as it is Leap Year I’m at her disposal

Then she spread-eagles me out on the ground

Winding wild flowers around and around

My pea-stick until a rose with a thorn

Accidentally pricks my horn

I emit a D H Lawrentian scream

Waking the house from its midnight dream

They rush forth with cries of lights

Finding their darling without her tights

With me presenting the oddest of sights

On this most curious of nights

Staggering round with my breeches down

Blood pouring all over the ground

And something dangling between my thighs

Which dangling elicits lascivious sighs

From some of the women and most of the guys

Proving that Lawrence had never told lies

Oh you should have seen their lantern-lit faces

At the prospect of further dynastic disgraces

And now to add to the general confusion

The old duke jumps to the wrong conclusion

Muscles us into remorseless marriage

Then hustles us off in the horseless carriage

To a villa he bought on a mountain in Greece

For his darling to sport in the fountain of peace

But peace is all that my wife ever got

Blown out and thrown out and simply for what

In her passionate haste she had never quite seen

Was that the dodgily rude magazine

Which had inspired my onanist joys

Consisted entirely of pictures of boys

drawing: Debbie Prosser

D.H. Lawrence