Instead of bewailing a lost youth, a man nowadays begins to wonder,
when he reaches my ripe age of forty-two, if ever his past will
subside and be comfortably by-gone. Going over these poems makes me
realise that my teens and my twenties are just as much me, here and
now and present, as ever they were, and the pastness is only an
abstraction. The actuality, the body of feeling, is essentially alive
and here.
-- D.H. Lawrence