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.