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    How Beastly The Bourgeois Is Interpretation Thomas

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    This poem criticizes the bourgeois class, especially bourgeois men. It presents a bourgeois man as handsome, clean-cut, and successful, implying others would want to be like him. However, when faced with emotional challenges or helping others in need, the poem says the bourgeois man will "go soggy" and become either a fool or bully. Compared to a mushroom, the bourgeois man appears upright but is hollow inside, living off "the remains of bygone life" and "sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life." The poem argues that while the bourgeois man seems pleasant on the outside, he is empty within and unable to understand others' struggles.

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    How Beastly The Bourgeois Is Interpretation Thomas

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    api-3744071
    4K views2 pages
    This poem criticizes the bourgeois class, especially bourgeois men. It presents a bourgeois man as handsome, clean-cut, and successful, implying others would want to be like him. However, when faced with emotional challenges or helping others in need, the poem says the bourgeois man will "go soggy" and become either a fool or bully. Compared to a mushroom, the bourgeois man appears upright but is hollow inside, living off "the remains of bygone life" and "sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life." The poem argues that while the bourgeois man seems pleasant on the outside, he is empty within and unable to understand others' struggles.

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    How Beastly the Bourgeois is Interpretation Thomas

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    This poem criticizes the bourgeois class, especially bourgeois men. It presents a bourgeois man as handsome, clean-cut, and successful, implying others would want to be like him. However, when faced with emotional challenges or helping others in need, the poem says the bourgeois man will "go soggy" and become either a fool or bully. Compared to a mushroom, the bourgeois man appears upright but is hollow inside, living off "the remains of bygone life" and "sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life." The poem argues that while the bourgeois man seems pleasant on the outside, he is empty within and unable to understand others' struggles.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    4K views2 pages

    How Beastly The Bourgeois Is Interpretation Thomas

    Uploaded by

    api-3744071
    This poem criticizes the bourgeois class, especially bourgeois men. It presents a bourgeois man as handsome, clean-cut, and successful, implying others would want to be like him. However, when faced with emotional challenges or helping others in need, the poem says the bourgeois man will "go soggy" and become either a fool or bully. Compared to a mushroom, the bourgeois man appears upright but is hollow inside, living off "the remains of bygone life" and "sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life." The poem argues that while the bourgeois man seems pleasant on the outside, he is empty within and unable to understand others' struggles.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    How Beastly the Bourgeois Is

    D.H. Lawrence

    How beastly the bourgeois is


    especially the male of the species-

    Presentable, eminently presentable-


    shall I make you a present of him?

    Isn’t handsome? Isn’t he a fine specimen?


    Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
    Isn’t god’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
    after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
    wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?

    Oh, but wait!


    Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man’s need.
    let him come home a bit a moral difficulty, let life face him with a new
    demand on his understanding
    an then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
    Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully,
    Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand on his
    intelligence
    a new life – demand.

    How beastly the bourgeois is


    especially the male of species-

    Nicely groomed, like a mushroom


    standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable-
    and like a fungus , living on the remains of bygone life
    sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.

    And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long
    Touch him, and you’ll find he’s gone inside
    just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
    under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
    Interpretation of this Poem
    In this poem Lawrence complains about the bourgeois and then especially ‘the male of
    the species’. The fact he calls the Bourgeois a species makes you he think he felt quite
    different from the social class.
    Further on in the poem, after his first two lines in which he makes he statement more than
    clear, he presents this bourgeois man as an example for everyone. However it’s quite
    ironically, he knows where to hit the reader of this poem: ‘Wouldn’t you like to be like
    that, well off, and quite the thing?’ In this line he knows how many people feel about this
    Bourgeois. They all think: if I was one of them I wouldn’t be so unhappy.
    But then there comes a turn in the poem which is quite recognisable: ‘Oh, but wait!’
    The next part tells us how a bourgeois man would probably react when confronted with
    misery. It would confront him ‘with a new demand on his intelligence, a new life-
    demand.’ In this part the bourgeois man is confronted and shows his weakness: he doesn’t
    know how to think about someone else except for himself.
    And after this part, the image of this healthy, handsome and clean Englishman is totally
    ruined. Lawrence makes his statement again: ‘How beastly…’ Also in this case Lawrence
    illustrates his statement but this time we are introduced to the same bourgeois man but
    from whole another kind. This man might be quite something but he only lives on other
    people remains. He’s nothing more than a garbage-eater, just ‘like a mushroom.’
    But, that’s his outside, inside he’s hollow, there nothing. That’s the problem with things
    that are lasting for a very long: they slowly bleed dead.
    In this poem Lawrence shows us how people think about the bourgeois. Yes, the don’t
    really like them, that’s clear. But underhand, they admire him because he’s the example
    for light-heartedness. Lawrence indicates this with the question: ‘wouldn’t you like to be
    like that?’ This line is closed by a question mark but every other line which gives us
    pieces of the bourgeois image is also closed by a question mark. It’s like Lawrence is
    hesitating about the goodness of these qualities.
    Actually, he is hesitating. No, he’s sure they aren’t as good as you might think. People
    who look nice on the outside live on the remains of others and are mostly hollow on the
    inside. That’s quite the message in this poem I think.
    Why did he wrote this? Probably because he wasn’t bourgeois himself. At least, in his
    youth he wasn’t. He mother was and teacher and he father worked as a miner. Both very
    hard working people which he really admired and who had a great influence on his work.
    The appreciation for his parents, who weren’t bourgeois of course, is also presented in
    this poem.

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