The English writer D. H. Lawrence wrote “Loggerheads” in the combative last years of his life, after the banning of *Lady Chatterley’s Lover* and under the shadow of tuberculosis. It appeared in *Pansies* (1929), a collection whose title puns on the French *pensées*, or thoughts, and whose short verses often feel like arguments tossed into a room. True to that mood, the speaker of “Loggerheads” is not trying to charm. He is demanding an inspection—then shrugging at the result.
The situation is a stand-off. “Please yourself how you have it” launches a challenge that is both an invitation and a dismissal. The addressee—lover, critic, or moral judge—is told to take the speaker’s words and fling them down on the counter roundly, then see if they ring like honest coin. The poem runs through a series of tests: sift my looks and expressions, see what proportion of sand is mixed into the doubtful sugar of verities, take stock of my manly breast to find out if I am sound or bankrupt. The phrase “manly breast” sounds almost archaic, as if the speaker is mocking the very language of heroic self-presentation. This ledger-like language turns a person into a shopkeeper’s account, but the speaker refuses to beg for a favorable audit. His indifference to the other’s dubious state is the pivot: whether you have found a fortune in me or a flea-bitten fate matters less than the act of surviving the inspection.
The form matches this brisk, unillusioned tone. Short lines, often carrying two or three stresses, move like a rapid inventory. The poem uses a loose ABCB rhyme scheme, but Lawrence roughens it with off-rhymes such as “state” and “fate” and the final “despair” and “care,” so that the music feels spoken rather than polished. Repeated enjambment—“Take my words, and fling / Them down”—makes the language itself seem tossed onto the counter. This is not the smooth lyricism of a poet asking for sympathy; it is the cadence of a man checking his own damage.
Lawrence’s imagery is financial and forensic. A counter, a stock-taking, a bankrupt breast, a fortune, an investigation—these suggest that love or reputation has been reduced to an audit. Yet the poem undercuts that seriousness with self-mockery. The “doubtful sugar / Of verities” is a striking phrase: truth may be sweet, but the speaker knows it is possibly adulterated. “Flea-bitten fate” is deliberately rude, as if the worst outcome is not grand tragedy but a scratchy, undignified nuisance. When the last stanza turns to the weeping willow, the conventional emblem of sorrow, the speaker’s “I don’t care” is not heartlessness. It is the exhausted defiance of someone who has already accepted the worst and refuses to perform grief on demand.
What makes the poem significant is how it stages the conflict between being judged and refusing to be shamed. Lawrence was repeatedly told he was unsound—morally, physically, politically—and “Loggerheads” turns that accusation into a dare. Instead of defending his purity, he invites the sifting and then walks away. For school readers, the poem is a useful model of poetic voice: it does not describe an argument; it is an argument. Its strength lies in tone, in the way colloquial speech, off-rhyme, and money imagery create a speaker who is prickly but not pitiable. That is a very Lawrentian stance—passionate, combative, and oddly tender in its refusal to pretend that being found a poor thing at best would destroy him.