D. H. Lawrence wrote “In Trouble and Shame” in the late 1920s, near the end of his life, when tuberculosis had already taken hold of his body and the censorship of *Lady Chatterley’s Lover* had made him a figure of public scandal. In that context, the poem reads as more than a private complaint; it is a compact vision of escape. The speaker watches a “swaling sunset” — swaling being a dialect word for blazing or burning — and wishes he could follow the light “Through the red doors beyond the black-purple bar.” That glowing horizon becomes a doorway out of the self.
The central idea is the longed-for shedding of shame, pain, and bodily life itself. Shame is imagined as something worn, like a pair of shoes left “in the porch”; pain is another layer of clothing. By stripping these off, the speaker would leave his “flesh discarded lying / Like luggage of some departed traveller / Gone one knows not where.” The body is not the person here; it is baggage, something that has been carried and can be abandoned. The traveller has already departed, and the speaker’s true identity seems to go with that traveller rather than with the flesh. The final turn makes this explicit: seeing his own “cast-off body lying like lumber,” he would “laugh with joy.” The joy is not macabre, because the body has become mere rubbish, while the one who sees it has passed beyond shame.
The construction reinforces that movement from heaviness to lightness. The poem is written in free verse, with no regular rhyme or metre, but it gains momentum through repeated wishes: “I wish I could go also,” then “I wish that I could go.” These repetitions feel like a litany, and the short lines isolate each act of removal. When the line breaks after “My shame like shoes in the porch,” the reader pauses as if at a threshold. The rhythm then opens out in the longer, flowing statement about the departed traveller, before contracting again into the blunt image of “lumber.” The sound of “black-purple bar” and “body lying like lumber” gives the poem a harsh, physical texture, while “red doors” glows against that darkness.
Key words do much of the work. “Swaling” suggests not just a sunset but a fire that consumes the day; it carries the heat of fever and the desire for purgation. The “red doors” are at once sunset, wound, and sanctuary entrance, and the “black-purple bar” stands between the speaker and that release. Ordinary objects — shoes, garments, luggage, lumber — anchor the poem in the everyday world, so that the mystical longing does not float away into abstraction. Shame becomes a shoe, pain a coat, the body a suitcase. The plainness of those words makes the imagined transformation feel possible. Even “laugh with joy” is deliberately simple, a childlike reaction after the weight of trouble and shame.
The poem is significant because it converts deep personal humiliation into a spare, ecstatic image of freedom. Lawrence was frequently preoccupied with the body as a source of truth, yet here the body has become a garment of shame that must be discarded so that something else — the “departed traveller” — can go free. Rather than lamenting his troubles, he turns them into objects that can be left behind. That refusal of self-pity, combined with the poem’s compressed intensity, gives it a lasting power. It speaks to anyone who has felt trapped in a body or a reputation, and it offers a vision of release that is both physical and spiritual.