Mal ,'Out Of Gas'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
My personal take on the poem about the daughter is that the starling is there to be a metaphor on finding freedom after struggle, while people watch who know they can't interfere or else make the struggle even harder.
I need to reread "Lolita." I confess I only read it decades ago because it was supposed to be naughty. I'm so low-brow.
I still do that.
I was so disappointed to be bored by "Lady Chatterley's Lover."
Apparently, Peyton Place is supposed to be all scandalous, but I didn't get past the first chapter.
Well, we live in Babylon, pretty much. Things that were shocking then, aren't so, now. I've read neither Lady C, nor Peyton Place--nor Lolita, for that matter.
It wasn't even that the naughtiness in Lady C's Lover was that ho-hum, I just thought all the characters deserved all the misery they were wallowing in. "You don't need a lover!" I yelled at the book, "you need a backbone!"
Lawrence suffers terribly from datedness, I've found. His characters are these dreary, languid, ennui-ridden creatures who seem ashamed of themselves for having feelings.
What's going to age like that that looks okay right now?
Very little. That's the point.
Heh.
DH doesn't feel dated to me. Certainly not to everyone's taste (I think his writing was often overly-facile, his prose a touch purple when it goes for blue, and were you to add one final chapter to Lady C, I could see it shelved in romance fiction--it's got that sort of feel to it), but it doesn't feel dated.