How beastly the bourgeois is
Especially the male of the species –
Presentable, eminently presentable –
Shall I make you a present of him?

Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen?
Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn’t it 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 to a bit of moral difficulty,
Let life face him with a new demand on his understanding,
And 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.

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 own life out of the dead leaves of greater lives than his own.
And even so, he’s stale; he’s been out there too long.'
Touch him and you’ll find he’s all gone inside,
Just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
Under a smooth skin and n upright appearance.
Full of seething, wormy hollow feelings,
Rather nasty –

How beastly the bourgeois is!
Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England
What a pity they can’t all be kicked over
Like sickening toadstools, and let to melt back,
Swiftly, into the soil of England.

D. H Lawrence