Alan's has been rifling through his socialist literature, and
reproduced a series of fascinating DH Lawrence poems on his blog. As he mentions in his post, these poems were originally published in 1929 in a volume entitled Pansies, and Alan and myself both spotted them in an old issue of 'World Socialist', which was a theoretical magazine produced by the
WSM for a few years in the mid-eighties.
I especially liked the poem reproduced below, though the eyesight is going a bit. At first glance, I thought it was called
'Oi - Start a Revolution', and I suddenly had Lawrence pegged as a
proto-Attila the Stockbroker type.
However, if I was psycho-politicising him - don't know what that means, but for the purposes of this post, it'll do - the opening line in the poem would mark him down as a disillusioned Council Communist in my book. The desperate cry of 'Somebody' at the end of the line with the exclamation mark for added emphasis puts him in the spontaneist camp, but with other poems in Alan's post carrying such titles as 'Kill Money'; 'How Beastly The Bourgeois Is'; & 'Money Madness', it means he could also be an
Anti-Flag type. Just a shame that with
his beard, he looks more like someone who would be playing second guitar in
Grandaddy.
O! Start A Revolution
O! start a revolution , somebody!
not to get the money
but to lose it forever.
O! start a revolution , somebody!
not to install the working classes
but to abolish the working classes forever
and have a world of men.
