The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence. D. H. Lawrence

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      The Schoolmaster

       Table of Contents

      I

       A Snowy Day in School

       Table of Contents

      All the slow school hours, round the irregular hum of the class,

       Have pressed immeasurable spaces of hoarse silence

       Muffling my mind, as snow muffles the sounds that pass

       Down the soiled street. We have pattered the lessons ceaselessly—

      But the faces of the boys, in the brooding, yellow light

       Have shone for me like a crowded constellation of stars,

       Like full-blown flowers dimly shaking at the night,

       Like floating froth on an ebbing shore in the moon.

      Out of each star, dark, strange beams that disquiet:

       In the open depths of each flower, dark restless drops:

       Twin bubbles, shadow-full of mystery and challenge in the foam’s whispering riot:

       —How can I answer the challenge of so many eyes!

      The thick snow is crumpled on the roof, it plunges down

       Awfully. Must I call back those hundred eyes?—A voice

       Wakes from the hum, faltering about a noun—

       My question! My God, I must break from this hoarse silence

      That rustles beyond the stars to me.—There,

       I have startled a hundred eyes, and I must look

       Them an answer back. It is more than I can bear.

      The snow descends as if the dull sky shook

       In flakes of shadow down; and through the gap

       Between the ruddy schools sweeps one black rook.

      The rough snowball in the playground stands huge and still

       With fair flakes settling down on it.—Beyond, the town

       Is lost in the shadowed silence the skies distil.

      And all things are possessed by silence, and they can brood

       Wrapped up in the sky’s dim space of hoarse silence

       Earnestly—and oh for me this class is a bitter rood.