Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Michael W. Thomas

Critical Essay by Michael W. Thomas

SOURCE: Thomas, Michael W. “Lawrence's ‘After the Opera’.” The Explicator 47, no. 1 (fall 1988): 26-9.

In the following essay, Thomas provides a line-by-line explication of Lawrence's poem, “After the Opera.”

“after the Opera”

Down the stone stairs Girls with their large eyes wide with tragedy Lift looks of shocked and momentous emotions up at me. And I smile.

Ladies Stepping like birds with their bright and pointed feet Peer anxiously forth, as if for a boat to carry them out of the wreckage, And among the wreck of the theatre crowd I stand and smile.

They take tragedy so becomingly. Which pleases me.

But when I meet the weary eyes The reddened aching eyes of the bar-man with thin arms, I am glad to go back where I came from.

—D. H. Lawrence

The poem [“After the Opera”] appears in the collection Bay.¹ In it, the first-person speaker...
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