ORWELL’S POEMS

Not a lot of people have read the poems Orwell wrote.

Here are two, and they are both good.

GEORGE ORWELL - Ironic poem about prostitution

When I was young and had no sense

In far-off Mandalay

I lost my heart to a Burmese girl

As lovely as the day

Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,

I said, “for twenty silver pieces,

Maiden, sleep with me’

She looked at me, so pure, so sad

The loveliest thing alive,

And in a lisping, virgin voice,

Stood out for twenty-five.

 

A HAPPY vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl’s bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?