David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)
Wages
1The wages of work is cash.
2The wages of cash is want more cash.
3The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
4The wages of vicious competition is -- the world we live in.
5The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle
6that ever turned men into fiends.
7Earning a wage is a prison occupation
8and a wage-earner is a sort of gaol-bird.
9Earning a salary is a prison overseer's job,
10a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird.
11Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison
12in terror lest you have to go in. And since the work-prison covers
13almost every scrap of the living earth, you stroll up and down
14on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking his exercise.
15This is called universal freedom.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: D. H. Lawrence, Pansies: Poems (London: Martin Secker, 1929): 112-13. PR 6023 A93P3 1929 Robarts Library
First publication date:
1929
Publication date note: See Roberts A47
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 2000.
Recent editing: 4:2002/1/12
Composition date:
24
November
1928
-
29
November
1928
Composition date note: See Ellis, 586
Form: Free Verse
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