Question

summer of first two stanzas of the last lesson of the afternoon​

Answer 1

D. H. Lawrence’s poem, "Afternoon in School: The Last Lesson,” appears in his collection, titled Love Poems. The collection organizes the poems into three sections: Love Poems, Dialect Poems, and The Schoolmaster. This poem, “Afternoon in School: The Last Lesson,” appears in the section, “The Schoolmaster.” This collection was published in New York by Mitchell Kinerley in 1915.

This two-stanza version of the poem is Lawrence’s final revision of the poem. Unfortunately, an earlier draft of this poem featuring six stanzas is widely disseminated on the internet, and that version is inferior to the two-stanza version. I suggest that if you encounter the six-stanza version, please ignore it in favor of the two-stanza version, offered in this article and here in the 1915 publication.

This poem contains some rimes that are scattered throughout the four movements. Likely the rimes occur rather accidentally, and do not, in fact, rise to the level of an actual "scheme." These seemingly haphazard rimes play well in dramatizing the utter boredom of the teacher.

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