Wages
Wages
Original Text
D. H. Lawrence, Pansies: Poems (London: Martin Secker, 1929): 112-13. PR 6023 A93P3 1929 Robarts Library
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.
Publication Start Year
1929
Publication Notes
See Roberts A47
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
RPO 2000.
Form