A friend heard Kenneth Branagh recite this poem in the film Coming Through, which is about D.H. Lawrence's affair with Frieda Weekley, who left her husband for him. The poem is in the dialect of Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, and my friend liked the way it sounded but couldn't understand some of it. So she looked it up online and, having found it, was still puzzled by some of the dialect, and asked me about it. And when I had taken a shot at paraphrasing it in standard modern English, she suggested that I put the result online for the possible benefit of others. So here it is. It will be interesting to see if this post ever gets any hits from search engines. If I can help one fainting literature student to a C-minus....

Here's a link to the poem at Project Gutenberg. It's a conversation between a brother and sister, assuming the word "sister" is meant literally, mainly in the voice of the brother, about an incident at the funeral of "our Ted," who seems to be their brother, though that isn't stated. 

Here's a link to an odd video in which the poem is recited in what I take to be its correct pronunciation by an animated photograph of Lawrence. It seems to be a labor of love on someone's part, and so I'm sorry to say that I find the video vaguely unpleasant, better listened to than watched.

And here's my attempt to lay it out in standard modern English. I'm making some guesses and assumptions: for instance, that the word "plank" means more or less what we mean, though "board" strikes me as more idiomatic for us in the context.  "Slive"--the manner in which the young woman approaches the grave--is defined in several dictionaries as "sneak," but I think "slip" seems more in keeping with the general attitude of the speaker toward the girl. I put it into paragraphs corresponding to the stanzas, with dashes as in the original indicating lines spoken by the sister. I'm not 100% sure that the lines "And him so young..." are meant to be hers, but typographically they seem to be.

***

VIOLETS

Sister, you know while we were on the boards beside the grave, while the coffin was still lying on yellow clay with the white flowers on top of it to keep off a bit of the rain

And the parson was making haste and all the mourners were huddling close together because of the rain, did you happen to notice a young woman away by a headstone, sobbing and sobbing?

--Why would I be looking around, when I was standing on the boards beside the open grave where our Ted was about to be buried?

--And him so young and so suddenly taken while he was being so wicked among pals worse than any name you could think of?

Let that be; there's some of the bad that we like better than the good, and he was one.
--And because I liked him best, yes, better than you, I can't bear to think where he is gone.

I know you liked him better than me. But let me tell you about this girl. When you had gone I stayed behind in the rain and saw what she wearing [or possibly "what she was doing"?].

You should have seen her slip up when we had gone, you should have seen her kneel and look into the wet grave--and her little neck shone so white, and she shook so much, that I almost

started crying myself. She undid her black jacket at the bosom and took from it a double handful of violets, all gathered together blue and white--and warm, for a bit

of the smell came wafting to me. She put her face right into them and cried again, then after a bit dropped them down into the grave. And I came away because of the heavy rain.

***

It's the last sentence, and mainly those last four words, that make the poem. I like it, though the dialect is an obstacle. I didn't know that Lawrence had written in this style. It's from a collection of poetry called Love Poems and Others, published in 1913, quite early in his career, and perhaps warrants further investigation. The whole book is available at the Gutenberg link above.

I'm not a fan of D.H. Lawrence in general. I think I enjoyed, but was not enchanted by, the two novels that I read in a Modern British Fiction course fifty years ago, Sons and Lovers and Women In Love, --or was it The Rainbow? Or maybe both? I can't remember for sure. And all I knew of his poetry was several free verse poems that still make it into anthologies. Or at least did when I was in college, and I didn't especially like them. 

Later on, when I ran across his work or discussions thereof, I was put off by his "dark forces of the blood" mysticism. (I can't remember where I heard that description--it isn't mine, anyway). His attacks on the desiccation of modern Western culture were (are?) accurate enough, but his prescriptions for a cure pretty dodgy. I recall especially a short story in which a European woman--modern, conventional, inhibited, etc.--awaits rather rapturously her sacrifice to an Aztec god, or something of that sort. Or perhaps that was an excerpt from a novel. Anyway, it struck me as sexually perverse, as  had some aspects of the novels, including what struck me as a somewhat homoerotic undertone. All in all, to be blunt, Lawrence strikes me as a man who had, to use a term that used to be relatively obscure slang but has passed into common usage in recent decades, a definite sexual kink. 

Here's a picture of Lawrence and Frieda, who hardly looks the femme fatale. 

And here is what I consider to be one of the very funniest Monty Python skits. Sons and Lovers is largely about a Sensitive Boy with literary talent and ambition, misunderstood and sometimes bullied by his Brutish Father, a coal-miner. It seems extremely likely that Python had it in mind when developing the skit, using an extremely simple and extremely effective twist.