no J5” i

D. H. LAWRENCE: THE MAKING OF A POET

Hubertien H. Williams

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1968

Approved by Doctoral Committee \ «

Copyright 1969 by Hubertien H. Williams ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Maqy people have contributed in many ways to the completion of this study. To all of them: thank you. But special acknowledge­ ment is due those few without whose assistance none of this would have come about.

The study represents the end product of three years of grad­ uate work made possible by a National Defense Education Act fellowship awarded through Bowling Green State University. It represents the end product of a most rewarding association with members of the English

Department there. Particularly I am grateful to Dr. John J. Gross who patiently guided me through a thesis and was still willing to serve as adviser for the dissertation. He is the epitone of the scholar, learned, kind, and generous with his knowledge. Dr. Richard

Carpenter and Dr. Frank Baldanza gave freely of their time and asked just the right questions when they were most desperately needed. To these three men I am particularly grateful. The University of Chattanooga also gave generously of both time and money to see the study to completion. Dr. James Livingood,

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, and Professor George Connor,

Chairman, Department of English, have been more than considerate in arranging scholarships as well as released time from teaching and committee work. Dr. William H. Masterson, President of the University of Chattanooga, however, merits a special acknowledgement for his efforts to see that the faculty has every opportunity to pursue their scholarly interests. We are all indeed grateful for his guidance. ii Professor Barry Chambers, University of Newcastle-on-Tyne, gave many hours over a period of two summers to a running discussion of the achievement of D. H. Lawrence. He provided me with many insights which I would not otherwise have achieved, and I am very grateful to him for giving so generously of his time and knowledge.

Finally there is my family: My children, Dick, John, Tina, and Beth, have contributed in ways far beyond measure. How can one adequately acknowledge a remark delivered by Beth, age seven, who, as she helped proofread the final draft, commented, "But this is beautiful!" To my parents, Edward William Rapp and Hubertien Gerard Rapp: thank you for making it possible for me to Be. To my husband,

John Henry Williams: thank you for understanding and for letting me Be TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PACE

I. THE POETIC VISION: THEME AND DEFECT...... 1

H. VIRGIN YOUTH...... 8

III. MAN AND WOMAN...... 40

IV. MAN AND NATURE...... 84

V. MAN AND SOCIETY...... 126

VI. MAN AND DEATH...... l?0

VII. AN EVALUTAION...... 197 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 205 T—’ I

CHAPTER I

THE POETIC VISION: THEME AND DEFECT

A poet by definition is simply one who composes poetry, but a

true poet, as opposed to the mere versemaker or the rhymster, writes

poetry to discover what he has to say. His first task must be the

creation of the poet, but creation of poet and poem go hand in hand.

The poem is an act of discovery for it constantly reveals two things: the poet’s theme, and the poet’s defect.3- That is, the poem reveals

to the poet what it is the poet is attempting to say, but the poem

also shows the poet where he has failed, where he has fallen short.

Therefore, as a poet progresses, he continually searches for the

answer to two questions: what it my theme? and what is my defect?

The poet continually works to communicate his vision. When the poet's vision is larger than the poet, then the poet must write and write

again, for the poem only approximates rather than encompasses the

vision, and therefore each poem is in a way defective. Few are the artists who can declare with lily, "I have had my vision,"2 for the vision is always in the making. D. H. Lawrence, a true poet, spent a lifetime attempting to

communicate his vision. Underlying the vision is a theme that infuses

^The idea for "theme" and "defect" was suggested by Hayden Carruth, "A Meaning of Robert Lowell," Hudson Review, XX (Autumn 1967-1968), 437 ff. ^A character in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse who is able to complete the last stroke of her painting as the Ramsay family reaches the lighthouse. 2 all his poetry, that links the poems one by one and volume by volume,

that provides the very raison d’etre of the poems. Vfe shall observe

Lawrence working away at communicating his vision, a vision which he

himself doesn’t completely understand, a vision only dimly felt and

expressed in his earliest poems, gradually felt more sharply, there­

fore revealing itself more sharply in the poems as the poet is created

and as the theme becomes clearer to the poet, even though finally it

can never find full expression in any one poem. One watches fascinated the struggle of the poet to communicate his vision; we see the change in poetic technique as the poet is created, and the change in subject matter as the theme gradually emerges although the theme itself remains essentially unchanged. There is constant effort to clarify the theme, to reveal the essential statement, to get to the bedrock of the poetic vision.

Part of our problem in evaluating Lawrence’s poetiy is due to the poet’s modernity. A. Alvarez makes the distinction between "con­ temporary" and "modern" when he comments of W. H. Auden:

If Auden is contemporary (and he seems to me much more "contempo­ rary" than "modern," with all that last word, in its best sense, implies of profound originality), he is so in the way a journalist is contemporary. That is, his business is to observe accurately, to present succinctly and to comment. His comment should be pointed, it should be allusive to what is happening there and then, to fashionable ideas and theories; but within these limits it should be easy. The journalist is not, in short, ever called on to think particularly painfully. His business is with the surface of things, not with their real nature.3

How little this description of "contemporary" fits Lawrence, for in

3 A. Alvarez, Stewards of Excellence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), p. 94. 3 Lawrence we do discover a profound originality, one attribute of modernity. Furthermore, Lawrence is never easy, and surely despite the painful thinking involved, Lawrence wrestled not with the surface of things but with their real nature. In the answers he discovered we find Lawrence is well ahead of his time, m an exceedingly per­ ceptive study of Lawrence’s ideas, Father Tiverton as early as 1951 recognized affinities between Lawrence’s thought and ideas expressed by Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Buber, ideas which are only now undergoing serious consideration and finding general acceptance.

For example, Tiverton quotes Martin Buber's words, "all real life is meeting," and shows the strong affinity of Buber’s statement with

Lawrence’s essential theme as we shall see later.

But Lawrence's modernity extends in still another direction.

Stephen Spender thinks the major problem confronting the modem artist is his lack of a closed system, the kind of closed system available to every writer up until the artist began to feel the dislocation and fragmentation brought about by the industrial 5 revolution. The modern artist has had to work within sane created framework of reference such as a Marxist or Freudian tradition, or he had to create a framework of his own: he may create his own myths as did Yeats; or he may turn to the past to create a set of values in a valueless present as did Pound and Eliot and finally Auden; or

h. Father William Tiverton, D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (London: Rockliff Publishing Corporation Ltd., 1951),» p. 106. ■^From an address by Stephen Spender at The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, Spring 1967. 4 he may create his own system of values as did Lawrence and Lowell.

Carruth could as easily be describing Lawrence when he says of

Robert Lowell that Lowell

is in fact making his life as he goes along, and with a degree of seriousness and determination and self-awareness that sur­ passes the artistic confidence of any previous generation. He has resolved to accept reality, all reality, and to take its fragments indiscriminately as they come, forging from them this indissoluble locus of metaphoric connections that is known as Robert Lowell.

Carruth writes of modernity that "the old idea of the enclosed work

of art was dislocated in the minds of serious artists: Heine, Rim­

baud, Strindberg. Such men began to see that art is always unfinished."

He continues, "artists had moved from an Arnoldian criticism of life to an Existential creation of life,"’'7 the latter phrase a perfect

description of Lawrence’s art and of his very modernity.

We need not concern ourselves with the question of Lawrence’s

essential truth at this point. All truths may be relative. Lawrence's

truth, relative or not, was for him essential to the assertion of his

life-force, to his Existential creation of life. Lawrence never played with truth. He was basically and essentially an honest man, and he told truth as he saw it. Vfe will instead listen carefully to what the

poet has to say before we pass judgment on the validity of his pro­ nouncements .

Therefore, our first task will be to discover and follow the creating of a poet in all his modernity as we trace his emerging theme

^Carruth, p. 445.

7Ibid.. p. 442. 5 from its first incoherent expressions to the vision which makes itself

known in the mid-period, to the extension of that vision to all of

creation, to the disappointment and frustration Lawrence felt with his

fellowman, and finally to the affirmation of life in terms of death.

Lawrence's poems divide themselves neatly by subject matter as

the poet achieves plateaus of awareness. Chapter 2, entitled "Virgin

Youth" for a poem by that name, reveals the poet in the making.

Lawrence seems to be dealing with a number of ideas without really

recognizing their relatedness. In a study of the imagery in Lawrence’s

poems, Shaw-Shien Fu divides the early poems into two groups. The

first group he describes as "objective" coming from the "impersonal

artist." In this group he includes the "descriptive" and the "dramatic,"

some seventy odd poems in all. The second group he describes as "sub­ jective " emanating from the "personal lyricist." In this second group o of poems he includes the amorous poems as well as the mother poems.

This study departs from Fu's arrangement by placing the amorous poems written to Lawrence's wife Frieda in a separate chapter from the

amorous poems which Lawrence penned to Jessie, Helen, and Louise, for

the Frieda poems reveal a further step in the creation of the poet.

The poems written to Frieda and published as Look! We Have Come Through i help to reveal the emerging theme as embodied by the man-woman relationship in the experience of marriage. Thus this group of poems receives special attention in Chapter 3, entitled

^Shaw-Shien Fu, "Imagery as Related to Theme in D. H. Lawrence’s Poetry." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1967. (Microfilm). 6 '•Man and Woman." Of particular importance are the concluding poems in this section as they recount Lawrence’s attempt to overcome his own essential isolation through a unification with another human being and the ensuing revelation as a result of that attempt.

Having achieved a degree of understanding of the man-woman relationship, Lawrence next directs his attention to man's relation­ ship to nature. Chapter 4 is entitled "Man and Nature." Lawrence's magnificent volume of poems Birds, Beasts and Flowers reveals the created poet and the emergent theme, man's essential relatedness to his universe. Again Lawrence is confronted by and attempts to resolve his existential isolation as he explores other realms of being of which man is only dimly aware.

In Chapter 5, "Man and Society," we see Lawrence extend his vision to include man in a world of men, the realm where Lawrence seems least at home both as man and as poet.

As Lawrence approached death, however, the poet is created anew and his theme achieves a cosmic extension. Chapter 6, entitled

"Man and Death," reveals what has been Lawrence’s concern from the very beginning, man's relatedness to his universe, for as the Exis­ tentialist has asserted, it is death that gives meaning to life, that makes life itself so very precious.

Thus we see that all along Lawrence has been talking about achieving the "fullness of Being" by existing dynamically in related­ ness to a dynamic universe, living religiously, moved by the Holy

Spirit which is within man if he will only listen and heed—that is

Lawrence's essential theme. And how modem it all sounds! the search 7 for God no longer "up there" or "out there" but discovered within man, at the "depth at the center of life," the Holy Spirit which is our very "ground of Being."9

The final chapter, then, Chapter 7, provides a discussion of

Lawrence's essential theme and his essential defect, and attempts an evaluation of Lawrence's lasting significance as a poet.

9John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia: The West­ minster Press, 1963). 7

CHAPTER U

VIRGIN YOUTH

When D. H. Lawrence set about revising and arranging his poems for the 1928 edition of his Collected Poems3-0 to be published in two

volumes, he labeled the poems in the first volume "Rhyming Poems."

The poems comprising this volume were collected from four earlier

publications: Love Poems and Others (1913), Amores (1916), New Poems

(1918), and Bay (1919). He reserved the poems of Look! We Have Come

Through 1 (1917) for the second volume, the "Unrhyming Poems," even though the "Rhyming Poems" volume contains seme poems that do not rhyme while many- of the poems in the "Unrhyming Poems" volume do rhyme. However, the division is not as arbitrary as it may seem on first encounter, for Lawrence himself by 1918 began to recognize an emerging theme. His division is therefore thematic. The early

"Rhyming Poems" encompass a wide variety of subjects while the Look! poems focus on a single subject.

It is necessary to emphasize that Lawrence himself revised and arranged the poems for the Collected Poems. He states in a preface to that edition that he has rearranged the poems "as far as possible, in chronological order, the order in which they were written."33- Lawrence starts the collection with "The Wild Common,"

30D. H. Lawrence, The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence. 2 vols. (London: Martin Seeker, 1928). 33D. H. Lawrence, "Preface" to the Collected Poems, 1928, reprinted in The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), p. 27. Hereafter cited as Complete Poems. All page refer­ ences included in the text will be to this edition of the poems. 9 deftly revised from its first appearance in Amores (1916). With the

hindsight provided by more than a decade of creativity, Lawrence saw

that with careful revision "The Wild Common" would serve admirably as

a thematic introduction to his work as a whole, and therefore he gave it the place of honor in the Collected Poems. Pinto and Roberts have, correctly, followed Lawrence's arrangement in the now definitive edi­ tion of Iawrence's poems, The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, but they have been equally careful to supply in an Appendix the earlier versions of those poems which Lawrence revised for the 1928 edition.

We shall devote our attention to the original version of the poem as it was first published in order to gain a clear picture of the youth­ ful poet in the making.

Pinto makes an important observation about Lawrence's early poems when he states:

He started by writing verse in the rhyming forms of the Georgians but unlike theirs, his early nature poems are full of sharp sensations almost painful in their intensity.^

Theme and defect appear neatly delineated by Pinto's statement, too neatly, although the statement helps clarify theme and defect. Surely the "sharp personal sensations almost painful in their intensity" represent or are the precursors of Lawrence's essential theme, but that this theme should be expressed in the rhyming forms of the

Georgians marks the general defect of the early poems. For one thing, Lawrence never becomes a master rhymester; such a pastime would be

■L^Vivian de Sola Pinto, Crisis in English Poetry 1880-1940 (third edition; New York: Harper and Row, 1958), p. 156. 10 antithetical to his essential nature. Nor can intense, painful

personal sensations be readily expressed in the rather flowery

Georgian tradition. But one additional point must be made: these

early poems are less descriptive poems about nature than they are

descriptive poems of someone’s feelings; the nature images are sometimes decorative as Fu has pointed out,^ but more often they

are analogous to the speaker’s action or emotion.

Fu divides the early poems into two groups, each with two sub-groups: the objective, impersonal poems which include the

descriptive and dramatic poems; and the subjective personal poems which include the amorous and mother poems.Harry T. Moore, on

the other hand, divides the poems according to subject: nature, dialect verse, schoolmastering, mystic creation, love, and death

of the mother.What is significant about these varying divisions is that they are arbitrary; what they really show is a young man in the process of creating a poet, trying his hand at a variety of subjects, some personal, some impersonal; we discover the would-be poet in search of a theme. Lawrence began very much in the Georgian tradition if two poems he wrote in 1904 at age nineteen are a fair sample of his

early work. Of these poems, '’Campions” and "Guelder Roses," he

^Fu, p. 2. l4Ibid.. pp. 21 ff.

■^•^Harry T. Moore, The Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1951), p. 55- 11 says, "most young ladies would have done better: at least I hope so.

But I thought the effusions very nice, and so did Miriam. Later, of course, he viewed the poems more objectively, and had the good judgment not to include them in any publications. The first stanza from "Guelder Roses" (p. 854) will sufficiently demonstrate the

"effusions" Lawrence had thought "very nice" at nineteen:

The guelder rose-bush is hung with coronets Gently issuing from the massed green; Pale dreamy chaplets; a grey nun-sister sets Such on the virgin hair of dead sixteen. The nature images and the emotion expressed are vague in contrast with what Lawrence learned he was capable of producing in the decade ahead.

After "Guelder Roses" Lawrence recounts "subsequent half- furtive moments" when he would "absorbedly scribble at verse for an hour or so, and then run away from the act and production as if it were secret sin."^ He was exploring what he terms "new knowledge"

... I used to feel myself at times haunted by something, and a little guilty about it, as if it were an abnormality. Then the haunting would get the better of me, and the ghost would suddenly appear, in the shape of a usually rather incoherent poem. Nearly always I shunned the apparition once it had appeared. From the first, I was a little afraid of my real poems—not my "compositions," but the poems that had the ghost in them. They seemed to me to come from somewhere, I didn’t quite know where, out of a me whom I didn’t know and didn’t want to know, and to say things I would much rather not have said: for choice,

Foreword" to Collected Poems, 1928, reprinted in Appendix I of The Complete Poems. 1964, p. 849. (Miriam of Sons and Lovers is Jessie Chambers, Lawrence’s early confidante). ^Ibid. l8Ibid. 12 The first problem the critic has with Lawrence’s demon is granting its

existence. Still one must take into account and evaluate what the poet

says about his work. Lawrence insists elsewhere that both the poems

and novels come "unwatched" from his pen, that they are spontaneous in

this sense, that they produce themselves, and only after they have appeared can Lawrence "do" something about them.^9 jf we can accept

what Lawrence says about how his poems are shaped, Lawrence, then,

is not a poeta. a "maker" of poems, but he is a vates. a prophet.

Lawrence, however, did reshape, make over, alter, his poems

as the variant forms attest; and Frieda made this ceminent, too. But

Lawrence says he did not alter the poems for the technique, but to

let the poems "say the real say," for "sometimes the hand of common- 2n place youth had been laid on the mouth of the demon." He goes on to say of the changes in the early poems:

It took me years to learn to play with the form of a poem: even if I can do it now. But it is only in the less immediate, the more fictional poems that the form has to be played with. The demon, when he’s really there, makes his own form willy-nilly, and is unchangeable. 1

But even as late as 1928 as Lawrence revised the poems for the Collected

Poems, he still had a distrust for the "demon" which produced his "real" poems, although he had learned to come to terms with it:

19■^Foreword to Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: The Viking Press, i960), p. 57• (This edition is the most readily available). on Foreword to Collected Poems. 1928, reprinted in Appendix I of The Complete Poems. 1964, p. 850. 21 Ibid.. pp. 850-851.. 13 to this day I still have the uneasy haunted feeling, and would rather not write most of the things I do write. . . , Only now I know ray demon better, and, after bitter years, respect him more than my other, milder and nicer self ... I must have burnt many poems that had the demon fuming in them.2^

Except for the poem "Virgin Youth," however, Lawrence never reveals

which poems are demon produced and which are not. He sheds only a

dim light on the matter when he comments about the changes he made in

"The Wild Common":

"The Wild Common" was very early and very confused. I have rewritten sone of it, and added some, till it seems complète. It has taken me txfenty years to say what I started to say, incoherently, when I was nineteen, in this poem. The same with "Virgin Youth," and others of the subjective poems with the demon fuming in them smokily. To the demon, the past is not past. The wild common, the gorse, the virgin youth are here and now, the same: the same me, the same one experience. Only now perhaps I can give it more complete expression.23

If we can trust Lawrence's memory, we have a startling demonstration

of a poem written under the influence of the demon in contrast with 24 one "composed" on a "slightly self-conscious Sunday afternoon," both poems written at age nineteen. First the effusions of

"Campions" (p. 854); the first stanza will do:

The unclouded seas of bluebells have ebbed and passed And the pale stars of forget-me-nots have climbed to the last Rung of their life-ladders' fragile heights. Now the trees with interlocked hands and arms uplifted hold back the light.

22^oreword to Collected Poems. 1928, reprinted in Appendix I of The Complete Poems. 1964, p. 850.

. 8^. 14 Now the opening stanza of the demon-produced ’’The Wild Common" (p. 891)

as it was originally written in 1904:

The quick sparks on the gorse bushes are leaping, Little jets of sunlight-texture imitating flame; Above them, exultant, the peewits are sweeping: They are lords of the désolate wastes of sadness their screamings proclaim.

The vitality of the images in "The Wild Common" pale the campions,

put them to shame. Why then did Lawrence in 1904, at age nineteen,

prefer the effusions of "Campions" and shun the demon? A comparison

of the last stanzas of these two poems should help clarify this point»

first the final stanza from "Campions"

Love-fire is drifting, though the bugle is prim and demure, Love-light is glowing, though the guelder-rose is too chaste and pure Ever to suffer love’s wild attack, For with the redness of laughter the battle is waging in the Campions’ rosy wrack.

now for the concluding three stanzas of the 1904 "The Wild Common"

So my soul like a passionate woman turns, Filled with remorseful terror to the man she scorned, and her love For myself in my own eyes’ laughter burns, Runs ecstatic over the pliant folds rippling down to my belly from the breast-lights above. Over my sunlit skin the warm, clinging air, Rich with the song of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad. And the soul of the wind and my blood compare Their wandering happiness, and the wind, wasted in liberty, drifts on and is sad.

Oh but the water loves me and folds me, Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me as though it were living blood, Blood of a heaving woman who holds me, Owning my supple body a rare glad thing, supremely good.

The theme is much less obvious here than the defects. Lawrence let the campions wilt; he saved the more overtly sensual "The Wild Common" 15 for a later day. So much for Lawrence’s demon: it seems to be merely

that drive for truth to feeling, but it told the puritanical nineteen

year old poet truths about himself he didn’t want to admit even though

he recognized the superiority of "The Wild Common" to "Campions."

Lawrence was rarely satisfied with his early poems. Appendix II

of the Complete Poems represents a collection of the juvenilia, 1904-

1912, poems Lawrence did not find suitable for publication at any time.

It contains thirty-eight poems in all. Appendix III is comprised of

variants and early drafts of published poems, but the vast majority of

the poems in Appendix III represent the "Rhyming Poems" period and

indicate Lawrence’s general dissatisfaction with these poems as com­

pared with his later poems.

In 1909—Lawrence had been writing poems for five years—Jessie

Chambers, with his permission, selected from among Lawrence’s poetry

and sent off a number of poems to the Editor of the English Review. 25 Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford). The November 1909 issue

of English Review printed a group of these poems under the general

title "A Still Afternoon." The poems included "Dreams Old," "Dreams

Nascent," "A Baby Running Barefoot," "Discipline," and "Trailing pZ Clouds" (later entitled "Baby Asleep After Pain"). Lawrence was in ^"Foreword" to Collected Poems, in Complete Poems. p. 851. For a more detailed account see E.T, (pseud. Jessie Chambers), D. H. Lawrence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935). pz ° Warren Roberts, The Soho Bibliographies, D. H. Lawrence (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965), p. 5l7 Note: The most complete work of this nature on Lawrence to date, it lists among other things the con­ tents of various editions of the poems, indicating where and when the poem was first published, the changes in title, a brief note about the volume of poems in which the poem appears, and the location of reviews, in addition to the usual publication information. It was invaluable to this study. 16 print for the first time. Significant, however, is the fact that

Lawrence altered every one of these first published poems, some of them quite radically, before he placed them in Collected Poems. None of them were included in Love Poems (1913) although they were included in Amores (1916). Not one of the poems in "A Still Afternoon" is memorable poetry—as Lawrence well knew. He says of "Dreams Nascent":

The public seemed to like it. The M.P. for school teachers said I was an ornament to the educational system, whereupon I knew it must be the ordinary me which had made itself heard and not the demon. Anyhow, I was always uneasy about it.2?

Three of Lawrence’s poems appeared in the following year, 1910, all three in the English Review. The April 1910 issue carried two poems: "At the Window," and "Wakened"—later entitled "Dream Confused," the only change Lawrence made in that poem. "Tired of the Boat" later called "In a Boat" appeared in the October issue. "Wakened" is the best of the three poems published in 1910.

Wakened /Dream Confused/

Is that the moon At the window so big and red? No-one in the roam? No-one near the bed?

Listen, her shoon Palpitating down the stair! —Or a beat of wings at the window there?

A moment ago She kissed me warm on the mouth; The very moon in the south Is warm with a ruddy glow; The moon, from far abysses Signalling those two kisses.

27 "Foreword" to Collected Poems, in Complete Poems, p. 852. 17 And now the moon Goes clouded, having misunderstood. And slowly back in my blood kisses are sinking, soon To be under the flood.

Wfe misunderstood!

"Wakened" is a fairly good compromise between the wilting "Campions" and the untamed "The Wild Common." Generally the images, both visual and auditory, are clearly defined except probably for the "far abysses."

Lawrence depends more heavily on rhyme rather than on regularity of meter; in this poem the whole line becomes the rhythmical unit which works out quite nicely except in line 17 where the demands of the rhyme overtake the demands of rhythm. But the poem works generally despite the awkwardness of the later rhymes—misunderstood-blood-flood- misunderstood—which tends to dispel the mood established in the opening stanzas. The "moon-shoon" rhyme works well here, almost as a soft pedal, and it paves the way for Lawrence’s excursion into the dialect poems.

Although Lawrence had only two poems published in 1911, he had published his first novel, The White Peacock, which was well received for a first novel. In 1912, his second novel, The Trespasser, was published, as were five poems: four in the Saturday Westminster Gazette. and one in the English Review. Those poems published in the Gazette recounted Lawrence’s experiences as a schoolmaster: "Afternoon in School," "The Punisher," "A Snowy Day in School," and "The Best of

School." The poems appeared on successive Saturdays in late May and 18 early June. "Snap-Dragon” was published in English Review in June,

1912, and later collected in Georgian Poetry 1911-1912.

As with nearly every poem Lawrence had published in the years

1909-1912, the "Schoolmaster Poems" underwent considerable reworking.

The original group, entitled "The Schoolmaster," included six poems plus an introductory poem "To One of Beys," The second group which appeared in 1913, included only three poems, two of the original group and one new poem. However, in the Collected Poems the original group­ ing is ignored and any relationship originally intended is lost. These poems seem little more than compositions or exercises.

"Snap-Dragon" is quite another story. In theme and execution this poem is much closer to "The Wild Common," and certainly it found itself in strange company on its appearance in Georgian Poetry 1911-

1912. This poem underwent revision before Lawrence included it in

Amores (1916), but the revision is not really drastic. Primarily he changed a word, occasionally several words or a line or two, but he omitted the final thirteen lines of the first version which describes the girl’s hand groping over the naked earth: Sending into its slumbering flesh Her fire, infusing its lifelessness With life, till the earth and the sky have tumbled entire Into darkness, open and eager for the thrust of the torches' fire.

In the opening lines we discover that the girl has lured the speaker, obviously a young man, into the garden. The stanza ends on the word

"Sinl" leaving no doubt as to the interpretation we are to make of the girl's action. She is a sweet temptress as she sinks into the grass 19 And I saw her bosom couch in the nest of her gown Like a heavy bird disturbed, and her shoulders stirred Strong and slow: "I like to see," said she, "The snapdragon put out his tongue at me."

She rouses the young man, and out tumbles a confusion of feelings and images, for the poet is not up to mastering this kind of emotion as yet:

My grail whose bowl was twined With swollen veins that met in the wrist, Under whose brown the amethyst Pulsed thickly; and I longed to pour My heart’s red measure in the cup, I longed to pour the burning store Of my blood in her darkened cup. Significant, however, is the improvement made in this poem between

1913 and 1916, not so much in the changed diction, but in the conclu­ sion. Lawrence deleted the last thirteen lines, and concluded the poem with a simple, direct, and much more profound statement: And death, I know, is better than not-to-be. 1 Lawrence was coming closer to his theme. Lawrence, like Dante, knew that one must experience life in order to know death. Dante denied the pains of hell and purgatory as well as the pleasures of heaven to those "forlorn spirits" who had lived life "without infamy and without praise." In the "Inferno" Virgil tells Dante of the fate of the vast number who are gathered together wailing to be ferried across the river:

They have no hope of death: and their estate Is so abased in the blind life they own That they are envious of all others’ fate. Lawrence suggests something of the same philosophy in the last stanza of "Snap Dragon" but the message seems more like the bravado of a very 20 unsure youth, probably an accurate description of the young man who

participated in the experience. The poem succeeds only as the voice

of inexperience expressing its conflicts; it is inexperience coping

with its inexperience in the moment of experiencing. The later poems

will show that this is the direction in which Lawrence wishes to go,

that is, capturing the experiencing in all its immediacy, which is not

quite what other Georgian poets were doing in 1911-1912. A random

sampling from Georgian Poetry 19H-1912 should make the point very clear:

Just now the lilac is in bloom, All before my little room; And in my flower-beds, I think, Smile the carnation and the pink;28

or And I remembered, drowsily How ’mid the hills last night I'd lain Beside a singing moorland burn; And waked at dawn, to feel the rain Fall on my face, as on the fern 29

or 0 gentle vision in the dawn; spirit over faint cool water glides Child of the day ,To thee;30

or Why for a whispered doubt should I Shun that other beech tree high, Red and watchful, still and bare, With a thousand spears in air ^1

00 °Rupert Brooke, from "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," Georgian Poetry 1911-1912, edited by E.M. (Edward Marsh), (New York: G. P. Put­ nam’s Sons, 1920). First published December, 1912. P- 33. 29Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, from "Devil's Edge," Georgian Poetry 1911-1912. p. 107. 3 * * * 3°Harold Monro, from "Child of Dawn," Georgian Poetry 1911-1912, p. 131. 3lEdmund Beale Sargant, from "The Cuckoo Wood," Georgian Poetry 1911-1912. p. 171. ZL Lawrence may reveal certain affinities in common with the Georgian

poets—two of his poems were included in Georgian Poetry 1913-1915.

but he soon had the attention of the Imagists as well.

It is significant that with the exception of "Dream Confused"

the poems that were published between 1909 and 1912 were rewritten,

sane of them many times. Evidently Lawrence worked at his poems; he

was not satisfied with the early poems even though they had been

accepted for publication; therefore, after he had published two novels

and achieved a modicum of success in that genre, he decided to have his

poetiy published too. Thus in 1913, the year of Sons and Lovers. 32 Lawrence's first collection Love Poems and Others was also published.

The dialect poetry in this first volume of poems earned Ezra Pound's high praise. There were four poems in dialect: "Violets,"

"Whether or Not," "A Collier's Wife," and "The Drained Cup." Of these poems Pound said:

. . . when he (Lawrence^) writes low-life narrative, as he does in "Whether or Not" and in "Violets," there is no English poet under forty who can get within shot of him .... It is no more possible to quote from them as illustration than it would be to illustrate a Rembrandt by cutting off two inches of canvas. . . . His prose training stands him in good stead in these poems. The characters are real, ... Mr. Lawrence has attempted realism and attained it. He has brought contemporary verse up to the level of contemporary prose, and that is no mean achievement. These two poems at least are great art.33

Despite the high praise, Lawrence revised "Violets" once more for the

Collected Poems.

32Love Poems and Others (London: Duckworth, 1913).

33gzra pound, in a review of Love Poems, Poetry, II (July 1913), p. 149. 22

But although Pound praised the dihlect poems, he severely-

criticized the love poems:

The Love Poems, if by that Mr. Lawrence means the middling sensual erotic verses in this collection, are a sort of pre- raphaelitish slush, disgusting or very nearly so. The attempts to produce the typical Laurentine line have brought forth "I touched her and she shivered like a dead snake” which was improved by an even readier parodist to "I touched her and she came off in scales." Jesting aside, when Mr. Lawrence ceases to discuss his own disagreeable sensations, when he writes low-life narrative . no English poet under forty . . . can get within shot of him.

The love poems which Pound objected to included.among others "Cherry Robbers," "Cruelty and Love" (later called "Love on the Farm"),

"Dream Confused" (earlier called "Wakened"), and "Wedding Morn."

If Pound objected to "Wedding Morn," (p. 58), Amy Lowell did not, for it was this poem with its dramatic opening simile

The morning breaks like a pomegranate In a shining crack of red that Amy Lowell quoted to disprove Lawrence’s assertion that he was not an "Dtiagist."^

Lawrence's membership in the "Imagist" camp is tenuous. Once he had come to the attention of Ford Madox Ford, Lawrence was invited to London in 1910 to meet the editor and some of his friends, a group that included at various times between 1908 and 1914 Ezra Pound, Amy

Lowell, H. D., Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, T. E. Hulme, and later

^Pound, p. 149. 35 Soho Bibliography, p. 21. See also Arrain Arnold, D. H.Law­ rence and America (London: The Linden Press, 1958), pp. 16-19 on imagism. 23 W. B. Yeats, among others.How much Lawrence participated in the

group is never made clear. It would appear that Lawrence made his

impression but he did not tarry. Like Pound and Yeats, Lawrence was

too individualistic to ally himself with a group for very long. Even though Lawrence was included in the Imagist anthologies, he never con­

sidered himself one of the Imagists, and certainly such a classification would be too limiting to explain Lawrence’s poetic talent. Nevertheless,

sixteen of Lawrence’s poems were to be included in Imagist anthologies between 1915 and 1930, six of the sixteen from Amores (1916). Two illustrations will help make clear why Lawrence was included as an Imagist and also show his direction away from the Imagists. Both

"Ballad of Another Ophelia" (p. 119) and "Scent of Irises" (p. 90) first appeared in Some Imagist Poets. 1915, 37 and then were collected in the Amores♦ The first stanza of "Ballad of Another Ophelia" will be sufficient to show the sharp images:

0 the green glimmer of apples in the orchard, Lamps in a wash of rain! 0 the wet walk of my brown hen through the stackyard! 0 tears on the window-pane! The second stanza discusses the apples that will not ripen. The third stanza focuses on the hen. But a rat darts into the fourth stanza, and "Extinct one yellow-fluffy spark!" From there on the poem changes: the speaker introduces herself, and in that stanza and the three that

3^See Stanley K. Coffman, Jr., Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951). 37soho Bibliography, B2, p. 199- 24 follow, she draws a peculiar analogue between the action revealed in the farmyard images of the first stanzas and the action that has taken place between herself and a lover. Lawrence defends the poem in a letter to Harriet Monroe, July 31, 1914, when he submitted poems for inclusion in the Imagist anthology:

Why, oh why, do you want to cut off the tail of poor "Ophelia's" ballad? Don't you see the poor thing is cracked, and she used all those verses—apples and chickens and rat—according to true instinctive or dream symbolism? This poem—I am very proud of it—has got the quality of a troublesome dream that seems inco­ herent but is selected by another sort of consciousness. The latter part is the waking up part, yet never really awake, because she is mad. No, you mustn't cut it in two. It is a good poem: I couldn't do it again to save my life. Use it whole or not at all . . .-50

At the risk of committing the intentional fallacy (and at that the poem probably fails to do all Lawrence hoped it would) we may surmise that Lawrence is interested in something more than or different from what the Imagist Harriet Monroe was after. Lawrence is obviously experimenting with images to see how he can make them work.

Another example, this time from "Scent of Irises," composed during the "schoolmaster" period, probably in late 1910 or during 1911 will also show experimentation with images to see how they will work. This poem is rich in images, but the images do more than invoke the five senses; they are made to serve as the link in time between the now and a remembered experience. The odor of the irises in a classroom starts the speaker along the path of images from the pres­ ent moment in the classroom back to the sacrifice among the beech- leaves. As was his practice during this period, he sought for control

*^The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Harry T. Moore (ed.) (New York: Viking Press, 1962), p.288. 25 by means of rhyme, but Lawrence’s rhymes are incredibly awkward:

"irises, irises, faces;" "table, unable, sable"»-the sable slipped

in for the sake of rhyme; "you, you, you;" "up, up, up," or to be

brutally honest here, "flowers rose up," "days close up," "gulf

throws up." Repetition, a technique Lawrence came later to rely

on, abounds in the poem: repetition of end rhyme words, as noted

above; repetition of key words in stanza after stanza—for example,

repetition of "bog-end" in three successive stanzas; repetition of

introductory words—in stanza three quoted below the six lines begin with "You, You, Me, Me, You, You;" repetition of the rhythm frcm line

to line clearly evident in the stanza below:

You amid the bog-end’s yellow incantation, You sitting in the cowslips of the meadow above, Me, your shadow on the bog-flame flowery may-blobs, Me full length in the cowslips, mutter you love; You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent, You with your face all rich, like the sheen on a dove!

One can clearly see here too that the line has become the rhythmical unit in which Lawrence is working. Note, too, the sound effects, the

repetition and variations on the "o," and the alliteration—particularly strong in the second to the last line. Clearly Lawrence is trying many poetic devices and with a degree of success obviously—at least

he pleased the editors of Some Imagist Poets with "Scent of Irises."

But many of the images of the poems of this period are pri­ marily decorative or metaphorical as in the slight but successful "Cherry Robbers" first published in Love Poems and reprinted unchanged

in Collected Poems. 26

Cherry Robbers

Under the long dark boughs, like jewels red In the hair of an Eastern girl Hang strings of crimson cherries, as if had bled Blood-drops beneath each curl.

Under the glistening cherries, with folded wings Three dead birds lie; Pale-breasted throstles and a blackbird, robberlings Stained with red dye.

Against the haystack a girl stands laughing at me Cherries hung round her ears. Offers me her scarlet fruit: I will see If she has any tears.

The rhythm of the poem is primarily alternating pentameter and trimeter, rhyming abab, cdcd, efef. The imagery is sharp and clear: the cherries are very ripe and juicy red; the dead birds are fresh bodies.

The same scene of "Cherry Robbers" becomes a central episode in Sons and lovers, although the novel was written later than the poem, if we can trust Lawrence in his chronological placement of the poem in Collected Poems. The prose account is also considerably longer since the incident is a pivotal point in the relationship between the fictional Paul and Miriam. A portion of the scene is worth recounting here, despite its length, for a comparison of the poetic versus the prose treatment.

. . . The young man, perched insecurely in the slender branches, rocked till he felt slightly drunk, reached down the boughs, where the scarlet beady cherries hung thick underneath, and tore off handful after handful of the sleek, cool-fleshed fruit. Cherries touched his ears and his neck as he stretched forward, their chill finger-tips sending a flash down his blood. All shades of red, from a golden Vermillion to a rich crimson, glowed and met his eyes under a darkness of leaves. The sun, going down, suddenly caught the broken clouds. Immense piles of gold flared out in the southeast, heaped in soft, glowing 27 yellow right up thé sky. The world, till now dusk and grey, reflected the gold glow, astonished. Everywhere the trees, and the grass, and the far-off water, seemed roused frcm the twilight and shining. Miriam came out wondering. "Oh!" Paul heard her mellow voice call, "isn’t it wonderful?" He looked down. There was a faint gold glimmer on her face, that looked very soft, turned up to him. "How high you are I" she said. Beside her, on the rhubarb leaves, were four dead birds, thieves that had been shot. Paul saw some cherry stones hanging quite bleached, like skeletons, picked clean of flesh. He looked down again to Miriam. "Clouds are on fire," he said. "Beautiful!" she cried. She seemed so small, so soft, so tender, down there. He threw a handful of cherries at her. She was startled and frightened. He laughed with a low, chuckling sound, and pelted her. She ran for shelter, picking up some cherries. Two fine red pairs she hung over her ears; then she looked up again. "Haven’t you got enough?" she asked. "Nearly. It is like being on a ship up here." "And how long will you stay?" "While the sunset lasts." She went to the fence and sat there, watching the gold clouds fall to pieces, and go in immense, rose-colored ruin towards the darkness. Gold flamed to scarlet, like pain in its intense bright­ ness. Then the scarlet sank to rose, and rose to crimson, and quickly the passion went out of the sky. Then Paul came down out of the tree and the two walked off together.

When Paul suggested they walk in among the firs, Miriam acquiesced, but as she relinquished herself to him, "it was a sacrifice in which she felt something of horror."^

The poem "Cherry Robbers" is written in first person while the episode in Sons and Lovers is given by an omniscient narrator, but the relationship between the "I" of the poem and the girl is almost imper­ sonal whereas the relationship between Paul and Miriam has been carefully built up to this climactic event. The tone of the poem is objective,

^D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London: Duckworth and Company, 1913), Part II, Chapter 11. 28

the last line light, almost bantering; the tone of the prose, however,

is intense, passionate, building to the climax. The passion of the sky

is analogous to and prepares for Paul’s passion with Miriam. Later on,

in poems contemporaneous with Sons and Lovers. we will see Lawrence

utilizing the analogue very effectively in his poems as he has utilized

it here in the prose. Raymond Wright in an analysis of Lawrence's use of the analogue refers to "'given' material, as formulations in terms

of birds and beasts (and sometimes of flowers) which may anticipate,

modify, or replace discursive analysis and one learns to expect them

especially at moments of stress or illumination." 4oLawrence habitually

sees an event or an action in terms of a natural analogue, and for

this reason, his images are much less likely to be decorative than they

are functional.

For example, Lawrence uses the analogue very effectively indeed

in "Love on the Farm." This poem is longer than most of his early ones and intensely powerful in its insistence on fear and cruelty as

concomitants of the love act, the death in life and the life in death.

The poem follows in its entirety:

Love on the Farm

What large, dark hands are those at the window Grasping in the golden light Which weaves its way through the evening wind At ny heart's delight? Ah, only the leaves! But in the west I see a redness suddenly come Into the evening's anxious breast 'Tis the wound of love goes home! ^Raymond Wright, "Lawrence's Non-human Analogues," Modern Language Notes LXXVI (May 1961), 427. 29 The woodbine creeps abroad Calling low to her lover: The sun-lit flirt who all the day Has poised above her lips in play And stolen kisses, shallow and gay Of pollen, now has gone away— She woos the moth with her sweet, low word; And when above her his moth-wings hover Then her bright breast she will uncover And yield her honey-drop to her lover.

Into the yellow, evening glow Saunters a man from the farm below; Leans, and looks in at the low-built shed Where the swallow has hung her marriage bed. The bird lies warm against the wall. She glances quick her startled eyes Towards him, then she turns away Her small head, making warm display Of red upon the throat. Her terrors sway Her out of the nest’s warm, busy ball, Whose plaintive cry is heard as she flies In one blue stoop from out the sties Into the twilight's empty hall.

Oh, water-hen, beside the rushes Hide your quaintly scarlet blushes, Still your quick tail, lie still as dead, Till the distance folds over his ominous tread I

The rabbit presses back her ears, Turns back her liquid, anguished eyes And crouches low; then with wild spring Spurts from the terror of his oncoming: To be choked back, the wire ring Her frantic effort throttling: Piteous brown ball of quivering fears! Ah, soon in his large, hard hands she dies, And swings all loose from the swing of his walk! Yet calm and kindly are his eyes And ready to open in brown surprise Should I not answer to his talk Or should he ray tears surmise. I hear his hand on the latch, and rise from my chair Watching the door open; he flashes bare His strong teeth in a smile, and flashes his eyes In a smile like triumph upon me; then careless-wise 30

He flings the rabbit soft on the table board And cones towards me: ah! the uplifted sword Of his hand against ny bosom" and oh, the broad Blade of his glance that asks me to applaud His coming! With his hand he turns my face to him And caresses me with his fingers that still smell grim Of the rabbit’s fur! God, I am caught in a snare! I know not what fine wire is round my throat; I only know I let him finger there Ify pulse of life, and let him nose like a stoat Who sniffs with joy before he drinks the blood.

And down his mouth comes to ny mouth! and down His bright dark eyes come over me, like a hood Upon my mind! his lips meet mine, and a flood Of sweet fire sweeps across me, so I drown Against him, die, and find death good.

Ey utilizing the woodbine, the moth, the swallow, the water hen, and the rabbit, as well as the sunset, as analogues of the action between man and woman, Lawrence is able to generate the combination of emotions which a lover experiences: the anticipation, the excitement, the fear, the dread, the terror, the repulsion as well as the overwhelming attraction, and finally the release.

The general atmosphere of the poem is suggested analogously by the images in the first two stanzas: the disembodied hands are dark and grasping, but the light is golden and the heart has delight; then the speaker realizes what she thought were hands are only leaves.

Suddenly, however, the golden light turns to red, the evening is

’hnxious," and love comes as a "wound.’'

The third stanza concerns the innocent, personified woodbine which exists in continual sexual activity exchanging stolen kisses of pollen by day, and yielding her honey-drop to the moth by night. 31 When the man "saunters" into the fourth stanza and looks in on the swallow, the swallow’s fright, her brief display "of red upon the throat," her flight, and her plaintive cry, contrast dramatically with the preceding stanza and prepare the reader for the fright experienced by the water-hen that blushes scarlet and lies "still as dead" at the "ominous tread."

The general tone, made explicit by "honey-drop," of stanza three corresponds with the golden light in stanza two; correspondingly, in stanza four—although the man emerges "Into the yellow, evening glow,"—the swallow makes a "warm display / Of red upon the throat," and in stanza five the water-hen "scarlet blushes" before it lies "still as dead."

The inaction of the water-hen contrasts with the events of the sixth stanza involving the rabbit. As the man approaches, the rabbit crouches in terror, then suddenly springs forward only to be caught in a snare. The man, not unkindly, "soon" puts an end to the rabbit’s struggle.

As if she has been watching the scene from the window, the speaker sees the man approaching, the rabbit swinging loosely as he walks along. Now all the terror of the rabbit descends on the wcman as the man approaches her, terror reinforced by the grim smell of the rabbit’s fur on his fingers. And then the blood red—suggested by the stoat and corresponding with the redness of "the evening's anx­ ious breast," the red of the swallow’s throat, and the scarlet blushes of the water-hen—descends into the darkness of evening as a "hood" descends upon the woman’s mind. But as lips meet, the image 32 changes to a "flood of sweet fire" which drowns; she experiences death

and finds "death good." The analogue with the rabbit is perfect, for as the man had not unkindly soon put an end to the rabbit’s struggle so he does the same for the woman; he eases her tension.

The rhythmical variations in the poem echo the action. The poem is primarily iambic and becomes fairly regular tetrameter in stanzas one through four. Stanza five begins with the same rhythm: Oh, water-hen, beside the rushes Hide your quaintly scarlet blushes, Still your quick tail, lie still as dead, Till the distance folds over his ominous tread! but the iambs change to trochees and back to iambs in verses two and three. The fourth verse makes a more dramatic change in rhythm, four anapests which in combination with the diction change the tenor of the poem, and focus attention on the "ominous tread."

The sixth stanza returns to the iambic tetrameter in verses one and two as far as the semicolon of the third verse. As the rabbit tries to make its escape, however, the rhythm changes abruptly:

The rabbit presses back her ears, Turns back her liquid anguished eyes And crouches low; then with wild spring Spurts from the terror of his oncoming: To be choked back, the wire ring Her frantic effort throttling: Note the spondee in the "wild spring," followed by a line of dactyls as the rabbit leaps to make his escape, followed by two more spondees in "choked back," and "wire ring," then a gradual return to iambic tetrameter as the rabbit ceases to struggle. The speaker has been relatively calm throughout the narration thus far except at the struggle of the rabbit where the rhythm changed 33 dramatically for a moment from the iambic tetrameter. At the approach of the man, however, she loses her calm; the irregular rhythm of the seventh stanza corresponds with the confusion of emotions experienced by the woman. All of her thoughts are now linked to violence and death: the dead rabbit, the sword and blade, the snare, the wire, the stoat, the color red, and blood. Finally in the eighth stanza he claims her; she experiences "death" finding it good, and as she does so, the calm gradually returns—as do the iambs.

"Love on the Farm" provides an excellent example of Lawrence’s use of the image as analogue for the action. The image is functional rather than merely decorative or descriptive as are the images in most of the poems contained in Georgian Poetry 1913-1915 where "Love on the Farm" was reprinted. This use of image as analogue for action is one mark of the difference between Lawrence’s poems and the so- called Georgian tradition. In addition to the numerous love poems Lawrence included a few

"war poems" as he called them in the "Rhyming Poems" section, although some of them dated as late as 1917, because he felt they belonged to the "death cycle" which began,-¿In 1911 with the death of his mother.^

Lawrence came late to his maturation, his rupture with home ties. His own ill health probably accounted for part of the problem, for he had come very close to death in a bout with pneumonia which left him susceptible to illness thereafter; and at times he was morbid about the death of his mother. He says of that period:

^•"Foreword" to Collected Poems, in Complete Poems, p. 851. 34 in that year, for me, eveiything collapsed, save the mystery of death, and the haunting of death in life. I was twenty- five, and from the death of my mother, the world began to dissolve around me, beautiful, iridescent, but passing away substance less. Till I almost dissolved myself, and was very ill: when I was twenty-six.2+2

He wrote a number of poems to his dead mother, none of them of interest beyond the autobiographical account of Lawrence's subjec­ tive reaction to her death. The best of the poems stemming from the death experience is "Nostalgia," first published in Poetry.

February, 1919, and reprinted unchanged in a little volume entitled 43 Bay. 1919. Lawrence included the Bay poems in the "Rhyming Poems" because he felt they were the "end of the cycle of purely English 44 experience, and death experience." "Nostalgia" was the concluding poem in the Bay volume.

Nostalgia

The waning moon looks upward; this grey night Slopes round the heavens in one smooth curve Of easy sailing; odd red wicks serve To show where the ships at sea move out of sight.

The place is palpable me, for here I was born Of this self-same darkness. Yet the shadowy house below Is out of bounds, and only the old ghosts know I have come, I feel than whimper in welcome, and mourn.

My father suddenly died in the harvesting com And the place is no longer ours. Watching, I hear No sound from the strangers, the place is dark, and fear Opens my eyes till the roots of my vision seem torn.

42 "Foreword" to Collected Poems. in Complete Poems, p. 851. ^3Soho Bibliography, p. 40. ^"Foreword" to Collected Poems. in Complete Poems. p. 851. 35 Can I go no nearer, never towards the door? The ghosts and I we mourn together, and shrink In the shadow of the cart-shed. Must we hover on the brink For ever, and never enter the homestead any more?

Is it irrevocable? Can I really not go Through the open yard-way? Can I not go past the sheds And through to the mowie?~Only the dead in their beds Can know the fearful anguish that this is so.

I kiss the stones, I kiss the moss on the wall, And wish I could pass impregnate into the place. I wish I could take it all in a last embrace. I wish with ny breast I here could annihilate it all.

There is nothing of sentimentality about "Nostalgia.11 The poem is

perfectly objective as it recounts a living experience, the return

by night to the old homestead, the encounter with the ghosts of past experience that haunt the stones, the desire to link up with the

past experience, to overcome the barrier which separates man frcm

his past experience, to enter in to it, to embrace it.

In this poem we find the culmination of all the experimenta­

tion with meter, rhyme, and image of this period. The line is

primarily pentameter, five major stresses, although the feet are

irregular. The rhyme scheme never varies from abba cddc etc., and the rhymes are never forced: night-curve-serve-sight; born-below-

know-mourn; corn-hear-fear-torn; etc. The images are exceedingly

sharp despite the fact that the moon wanes and the place is inhabited by ghosts of the past. The blend of form and content is wholly satisfactory, especially if the poem is read aloud. Here the poet

exhibits his mastery of the traditional poetic. 36

The final poem in the "Rhyming Poems" section, although it is not as expertly fashioned as "Nostalgia," provides a neat transition into the next period of Lawrence's poetic experience. Interestingly enough, Lawrence emitted this poem from Collected Poems (1928). It had appeared in Amores (1916). The poem was placed as the final poem of "Rhyming Foems" by the editor of D. H. Lawrence; The Complete poems published in three volumes in 1957.^ "Restlessness" (p. 179) reveals an "I" standing at the door ready to move out into the night, uncertain of what the night will offer yet aware that there is a great experi­ ence awaiting:

Restlessness At the door of the room I stand and look at the night, Hold my hand to catch the raindrops, that slant into sight, Arriving grey from the darkness above suddenly into the light of the roan. I will escape from the hollow room, the box of light, And be out in the bewildering darkness, which is always fecund, which might Mate my hungry soul with a germ of its womb. I will go out to the night, as a man goes down to the shore To draw his net through the surf’s thin line, at the dawn before The sun warms the sea, little, lonely and sad, sifting the sobbing tide. I will sift the surf that edges the night, with my net, the four Strands of ray eyes and my lips and my hands and my feet, sifting the store Of flotsam until my soul is tired or satisfied. I will catch in my eyes’ quick net The faces of all the women as they go past, Bend over them with my soul, to cherish the wet Cheeks and hair a moment, saying: "Is it you?" Looking earnestly under the dark umbrellas, held fast Against the wind; and if, where the lamplight blew Its rainy swill about us, she answered me With a laugh and a merry wildness that it was she Who was seeking me, and had found me at last to free Me now from the stunting bonds of ray chastity, How glad I should be! 45 Soho Bibliography, p. 191. « A *» * 37 Moving along in the BysTeMoutg, ej?b of the night Pass the men whose q^s.&re^hutj like anemones in a dark pool; Why don’t they open with visionjvand. speak to me? What have they in sight? ‘ Why do I wander aimless among them, .’desirous fool? I can always linger over the huddled books on the stalls, Always gladden my amorous fingers with the touch of their leaves, Always kneel in courtship to the shelves in the doorways, where falls The shadow, always offer myself to one mistress, who always receives. But oh, it is not enough, it is all no good. There is something I want to feel in my running blood, Something I want to touch; I must hold my face to the rain, I must hold my face to the wind, and let it explain Me its life as it hurries in secret. I will trail my hands again through the drenched, cold leaves, Till my hands are full of the chillness and touch of leaves, Till at length they induce me to sleep, and to forget.

The poem is given in its entirety because it seems to suggest the theme toward which the poet has been groping, his need to be fully alive, his need to discover who he is in relation to the world, his need to go forth to meet experience. The speaker is ready to go forth into the unknown, into the realm of experience, so say the images of the first stanza, ready to sift the flotsam of the sea of experience until his soul is "tired and satisfied."

The first experience he will have, according to the second stanza, will be a sexual encounter which will release him from the

"stunting bonds of . . . chastity." The problem of chastity underlies a great many poems of Lawrence’s early period, poems to Miriam, "the

Christian nun" as Fu calls her; to Helen, "the pagan priestess"; and to Louise, a "mutable witch.The problem of chastity is the central

^Fu, p. 18. problem of "Virgin Youth," and7certainly a major factor in Lawrence’s struggle with his "demon.'’ But the woman he is seeking here he sees as also out in the night seeking him. Interestingly enough, the vol­ ume of poems Look! We Have Gone Through! reveals the story of this encounter and becomes the subject of Chapter III, "Man and Woman."

. In the third stanza the speaker seeks out the world of men,

Lawrence’s fellowman from whom he obviously feels alienated and with whom he so desperately needs to communicate. He turns more easily to books. Chapter V, "Man and Society," recounts the story of Law­ rence's dislocation in the world of men.

The final stanza however strikes out toward the essential theme, still beyond the grasp of the poet at this stage of his development. He turns to nature, to the wind and rain, in order to

"let it explain / Me its life . . . ." It is Romantic of course, but a romanticism beyond the Georgians, and into the Modern, for

Lawrence is reaching out for the very Ground of Being, to what it is that he has in common with his cosmos, with the wind and the rain, with the chill and the feel of cold leaves

Till at length they induce me to sleep, and to forget.

Wfe are meant to remember Wordsworth’s "Intimations of Immortality" where "birth Is but a sleep and a forgetting," and Lawrence will return to these very words again in his Last Poems as he nears death. In the early poems Lawrence is seeking a means of overcoming his existential isolation through a unification of his being with his 39 cosmos. Lawrence will transcend his mortality in this life. His search for this common ground of being, begun almost inarticulately in his first real poem "The Wild Common" continues through his Look!

We Have Come Through! poems where he makes a discovery of vast importance to his evolving concept of Being; continues through his great book of nature poems, Birds. Beasts and Flowers; interweaves and underlies the Pansies and Nettles; and finds its final grand expression in the Last Poems as the poet salutes his approaching death. At last we see what he has been seeking: he has been seeking

God.

We turn next, then, to Lawrence’s encounter with the woman he has been seeking, the woman in stanza two of "Restlessness.”

That story is told in the volume of poems, Look! Wfe Have Cane

Through! CHAPTER in

MAN AND WOMAN

Because the poems of Look! We Have Ccme Through! form an organic unit, they are treated separately from other poems with which they would otherwise be allied chronologically and formally insofar as structure is concerned. The division of the Collected

Poems into "Rhyming" and "Unrhyming" poems is Lawrence's. In the first section he placed all those poems written between 1904 and 1917 with the exception of the poems collected in the Look! volume.

Even though the latter poems were written between 1912 and 1917— most of them in the rhyming tradition of the poems discussed in the previous chapter—nevertheless Lawrence placed them with the "Unrhym ing Poems." Apparently Lawrence decided the Look! poems belonged to the "Unrhyming" tradition because they conprised a thematic unity and because the concluding poems in that volume showed the new direction in which the poet was going both thematically and struc­ turally.

As far as the theme of this volume of poems is concerned,

Lawrence states it best in the "Argument" which also provides a synopsis of the action in the Look! poems: After much struggling and loss in love and in the world of men, the protagonist throws in his lot with a woman who is already married. Together they go into another country, she perforce leaving her children behind. The conflict of love and hate goes on between the man and the woman, and between these two and the world around them, till it reaches some sort of conclusion, they transcend into some condition of blessedness.47

471 Complete Poems, p. 191. 41 The volume of poems is, of course, autobiographical in nature. Lawrence,

26, met Frieda Weekley, 32, wife of his former French teacher and mother

of three children, when he went to the Weekley home in April 1912 to

inquire about a possible teaching position in a German university.

Within a month, on May 3, the two departed for Germany, Frieda osten­

sibly to visit her parents. Except for a brief visit to England during

the summer of 1913, the two remained on the Continent until Frieda's divorce was granted in May 1914. Then the couple returned to England and were married July 13, 1914. As the "Argument" attests, the Lookl

poems recount the trials of this relationship in all its sturm und drang until the conflict is resolved in a wondrous revelation, accord­ ing to the poetic account. However, we are concerned with the bio­

graphical details only as they lead the poet to self-discovery in an artistic sense. The underlying theme is man's need for woman, "not woman indiscriminate" as Lawrence points out in the "Manifesto," but one woman who can bring him to the full flowering of his being.

The theme that Lawrence is pursuing in these poems is the same theme that informs The Rainbow and even more directly Women in Love which are contemporaneous with the poems. The theme is given a still more direct approach in his "philosophical treatise" Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious also written during this period. If the poem is an act of discovery as our thesis asserts, then these poems reveal the poet’s growing awareness of his needs and of the mode for fulfillment. In a "Foreword" to the Lookl volume, lawrence indicates that the 42

poems should not be considered separately, as so many single pieces. They are intended as an essential story, or history, or confession, unfolding one from the other in organic develop­ ment, the whole revealing the intrinsic experience of a man during the crisis of manhood, when he marries and comes into himself. The period covered is, roughly, the sixth lustre of a man’s life.2*®

Amy Lowell suggested that the poems should be read as a novel since

their stoiy unfolds as a novel. But each poem is a record of a sep­

arate moment, an instant of fresh experience containing its own

meaning and contributing that moment of experience to the sum total of

experience; the individual poems, then, when taken together make up a

story of disconnected but sequential moments of experience. The near­

est thing to this poetic innovation would probably be the Elizabethan

sonnet cycle where each sonnet is of intrinsic interest in itself, but

when the sonnets are read as a unit, they reveal a story or the flux

of a relationship. The most marked difference between the individual

Lawrencean poems and the sonnet, however, is the manner in which the

experience is recounted.

In an introduction to the American edition of New Pnems pub­

lished in 1918 Lawrence set forth exactly that area of experience which he attempted to capture in the Look! volume, the very moment of experience, the immediate present, the NOW, "life surging itself into utterance at its very well-head,"^ with free verse the mode of expres

sion. Lawrence contrasted his poetry with two other kinds of poetry.

48 "Foreword" to Lookl We Have Ccrae Through! reprinted in Complete Poems, p. 191. ^"Poetry of the Present," an introduction to the American edition of New Poems, reprinted in Complete Poems, p. 183. 43 "Poetiy is, as a rule," he says, "either the voice of the far future, exquisite and ethereal, or it is the voice of the past, rich, magnifi­ cent." He likens these two kinds of poetry to the songs of birds.

Such poetry, he says, "must have that exquisite finality," must be

complete and consummate. This completeness, this consumraateness, the finality and the perfection are conveyed in exquisite form: the perfect symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance where the hands link and loosen and link for the supreme moment at the end. Perfected bygone moments, perfected moments in the glimmering futurity, these are the treasured gem-like lyrics of Shelley and Keats.3°

In contrast with this "exquisite fowl" this "perfect symmetry" which is possible only when man has completed an experience and attempts to make order of that experience by placing it in a pattern, there is another kind of poetry possible,

the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, inter­ mingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. The living plasm vibrates unspeakably . . .31

Lawrence is seeking expression for the very moment of experience as it occurs and before it has had time to be dissected and fixed into a restraining pattern: There must be mutation, swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and-go, not fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without denouement of dose. There must be the rapid momentaneous association of things which meet and pass on the forever incalculable journey of creation; everything left in its own rapid, fluid relationship with the rest of things. Such poetry is the "unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present," 30"Poetry of the Present," in Complete Poems, p. 182.

33Ibid. 32Ibid.. p. 183. 44 and it was Lawrence’s opinion that Whitman’s was the best of this kind.

Lawrence was aware, of course, that Whitman worked at producing poetry of the sheer present, for he acknowledges that "Whitman pruned away his cliches—perhaps his cliches of rhythm as well as of phrase." Lawrence recognized the tremendous difficulty of finding the right rhythm to interpret the mood.

But, in spite of Lawrence’s fine pronouncements about poetry of the sheer present and free verse, actually the poems in Lookl except for the very last poems in that volume, are not radically different frcm the last poems in the "Rhyming Poems" section. Nor should we expect them to be significantly different when we recognize how much the dates of the respective groups of poems overlap—frcm 1912 to 1917.

As a matter of fact, several of the Lookl poems were first collected elsewhere: "Bei Hennef," was first published in Love Poems and Others

(1913); two poems, "On the Balcony" (as "illicit") and "Green," were included in Some Imagist Poets (1915); "Meeting Among the Mountains" appeared in Georgian Poetry, 1913-1915 as did "Giorno Dei Morti" under the title "Service of AH the Dead"; and the very long poem "New Heaven and Earth" was first printed under the title "Terra Nuova" in Some

Imagist Poets (1917). As it turns out, forty-one of the sixty-odd poems of Look! are rhyming, two are in blank verse, and only twenty- two are in free verse. The Look! poems, then, are transitional in that Lawrence is experimenting now and again with free verse; they are innovational in that the poems are to be read as an essential story. Lawrence con­ tinued to rely on rhyme as a means of organizing and controlling his i±5 his material -until about 1915; his reading of Whitman in preparation for Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) apparently took

place sometime between 1915 and 1917, that influence manifesting itself somewhat in the closing poems of Look! as the discussion of these poems will show. As with the Georgians and the Imagists, how­ ever, so also with Whitman: Lawrence salutes, borrows something, and passes on. He is too artistically temperamental to remain in any camp, either for careful study of technique or for imitation; he is much more interested in ideas, particularly where Whitman is concerned, than he is in form. He may even be an unwitting imitator of Whitman’s form for the resemblances are superficial as we shall see later, although he:was very much fascinated by Whitman's doctrine of the

"Open Road, the great heme of the Soul." Lawrence interpreted this doctrine to mean man going forth to meet experience. We express our­ selves in the journey itself, down the open road. Exposed to full contact. On two slow feet. Meeting whatever comes down the open road. In company with those that drift in the same measure along the way. Towards no goal. Always the open road.33

Lawrence applied this doctrine to his poetics for he came to believe that only in free verse can one capture the immediacy of experiencing, the quick of Being: Such is the rare new poetry. One realm we have never conquered: the pure present. One great mystery of time is terra incognita to us: the instant. The most superb mystery we have hardly

33D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1951)» P- 185. k6 recognised: the immediate instant self. The quick of all time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self. Poetry gave us the clue: free verse.54 Lawrence’s modernity becomes immediately apparent. He^sees the possibility for art to become a life-constructing function, free verse as a means of opening oneself to experience. In this sense he is making his life as he goes along, embracing the instant as it offers itself, and recording the instant in free verse, for he believed finally that free verse imitates the experiencing of an experience.

Lawrence saw the poems of Lookl We Have Come Through1 as each one representing a moment of experience. When these moments are placed side by side, they imitate the flux of a relationship; they make up "an essential story, or history, or confession, unfolding one from the other in organic development" as Lawrence had promised in the "Foreword" to the Lookl volume. The first poem "Moonrise" serves as an interesting introduction to the poems which follow for what it has to say about experience. Oddly enough,the poem is blank verse rather than free verse, and it belongs to "rhyming" period of Lawrence’s development as do the great majority of the poems in Lookl

Moonrise

And who has seen the moon, who has not seen Her rise frcm out of the chamber of the deep Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber Of finished bridegroom seen her rise and throw

54„Poetry of the Present," in Complete Poems, p. 185. 1+7 Confession of delight upon the wave, Littering the waves with all her own superscription Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us Spread out and known at last, and we are sure That beauty is a thing beyond the grave, That perfect, bright experience never falls To nothingness, and time will dim the moon Sooner than our full consummation here In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

The poem has been carefully constructed. It is about more than the moon, for the moon operates in this poem as image, as metaphor, and as symbol; it is about the perfect experience which rises up like the moon, in this case probably the perfect experience of love as suggested by the "finished bridegroom" of line 4, but the poem need not neces­ sarily be about love. It can be about any moment of experience that is itself perfection. Once experienced, the beauty of that moment cannot dim; it belongs to eternity in the same way that the beauty of the moon is eternal.

Lawrence sought always for the single unifying principle under­ lying all experience. In "Moonrise" he says that the perfect experi­ ence belongs to the eternal as an experience of the eternal; it rises from the eternal; it cannot dim. This statement is an article of faith; it belongs to that realm of human experience that can only be suggested metaphorically, poetically. One wonders at the perfection of the experience as one wonders at the perfection of the moon. "I believe, I believe in the moon"33 cries the poet, and he speaks to another poetic soul. As one experiences the perfection of the moon, so one experiences the perfection of the moment, with its yea-saying

33Theodore Roethke, "Her Words." 48 as well as its nay-saying, its quivering iridescence, like the moon which litters the

. . . waves with her own superscription Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us Spread out or, again, as Lawrence says to the sea:

You who take the moon as in a sieve, and sift Her flake by flake and spread her meaning out. (p. 197) These poems can do to an experience what the sea does to the moon: take the moments of experience "flake by flake" and "spread" the

"meaning out." Thus "Moonrise" introduces the method of Look! Vfe

Have Come Throught—that is, the examination of the moments (the flakes) which comprise a total experience (the moon).

"Moonrise" is closely related in meaning to a scene in Women in Love with which it is contemporaneous. The scene takes up three pages in the "Moony" chapter, but portions of the scene are worth recounting. Birkin stands at the water's edge in the moonlight and hurls stones at the moon's image reflected in the water: there was a burst of sound, and a burst of brilliant light, the moon had exploded on the water, and was flying asunder in flakes of white and dangerous fire. Rapidly like white birds the fires all broken rose across the pond, fleeing in clamor­ ous confusion . . . the furthest waves of light, fleeing out, seemed to be clamouring against the shore for escape, the waves of darkness came in heavily, running under towards the centre. But at the centre, the.heart of all was still a vivid, incandescent quivering of a white moon not quite destroyed, a white body of fire writhing and striving and not even now broken open,/ not yet-violated. It seemed to be drawing it­ self together with strange, violent pangs, in blind effort. It was getting stronger, it was re-asserting itself, the inviolable moon. And the rays were hastening in in thin lines of light, to return to the strengthened moon, that shook upon the water in triumphant reassumption.5° 56D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Martin Seeker), p. 260. Birkin wishes to preserve his isolation separated out frcm other people as the flakes of the moon were separated out each time he

hurled a stone into the water. But the flakes continued to regroup,

to recompose into the moon’s image, just as the moments of the exper­

ience group together to make up the total experience.

But whereas Birkin is attempting to remain an isolate at this

point in the novel, the speaker in the early poems of Look! yearns

to overcome his immediate sense of isolation and separateness. In

"Elegy" (p. 193) the closing stanza states:

I can look through The film of the bubble night, to where you are, Through the film I can almost touch you.

and in "Nonentity" (p. 194) he closes with Oh, and it is sweet _ To be all these things (stars, wind, grass] not to be Any more myself.

For look, I am weary of myself! In "Elegy" he will overcome his sense of isolation through love, but

in "Nonentity" he will merge himself with the stars, wind, and the grass, to become one with the cosmos. Later on Lawrence will change

his mind about all this merging. Enter Frieda "Upon her plodding palfrey . . . Dissatisfied and weary," ready once more to go off to a strange country with another

beggar. In the "Ballad of a Wilful Woman" (p. 200) Lawrence paints a frank picture of the wife Frieda had been, for Joseph is not Joseph but is obviously only poor, long-suffering Professor Wbekley, and

Frieda is up to one more of her old tricks. The poem would be a 50 travesty except that it is saved by its own ironic truth. Joseph is made out to be a patient fool while the dissatisfied woman seeks ful­ fillment elsewhere again and again. Finally in the "Fifth Part" we discover that

. . . Joseph, grey with waiting, His dark eyes full of pain, Heard: "I have been to Patmos; Give me the child again."

Now on with the hopeless journey Looking bleak ahead she rode And the man and the child of no more account Than the earth the palfrey trode. Till a beggar spoke to Joseph, But looked into her eyes; So she turned, and said to her husband: "I give, whoever denies."

Sixth Part

She gave on the open heather Beneath bare judgment stars, And she dreamed of her children and Joseph, And the isles, and her men, and her scars.

And she woke to distil the berries The beggar had gathered at night, Whence he drew the curious liquors He held in delight.

He gave her ho crown of flowers, No child and no palfrey slow, Only led her through harsh, hard places Where strange winds blow.

She follows his restless wanderings Till night when, by the fire’s red stain Her face is bent in the bitter stream That comes from the flowers of pain. Then merciless and ruthless He takes the flame-wild drops To the town, and tries to sell them With the market crops. 51 So she follows the cruel journey That ends not anywhere. And dreams, as she stirs the mixing-pot, She is brewing hope from despair.

Perhaps the most incredible fact about this poem concerns the place

and time of writing. The couple had left England on May 2 after a

very brief acquaintance. They arrived in Trier on May 9 and stayed

until June 2 when they moved on to Icking. Thus the poem, written

at Trier, was composed in the first month of the elopement. Never­

theless, the poem is an adequate forecast of the Lawrence’s state-of- affairs in the years ahead, for Lawrence did indeed lead Frieda through

’’harsh, hard places," he gave her "no child and no palfrey," he mar­ keted the "flame-wild drops" of poetry distilled from their experience

of love, and Frieda continued always to hope despite her despair. But the poem has no real value beyond its autobiographical interest; and this will be the criticism of the vast majority of the poems in this volume. Diana Trilling comments that "Lawrence's personal poetry is much less moving than his poetry of doctrinal inspiration. The emo­ tions it communicates are likely to be shallow or shoddy."3? Father

Tiverton found the "intrusion of . . . personal problems" very damaging

and thought Lawrence wisely used his poems as a "safety-valve for what might damage his novels,""’? Pinto comments that Lawrence, "like

Byron, . . . was a poet who could only reach his full maturity when

3?Diana Trilling, The Portable D. H. Lawrence (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), p. 472. 3®Tiverton, p. 37. 52 he had got rid of the autobiographical preoccupation."3^ W. H. Auden

simply finds the love poems embarrassing, for they make him feel like a "Peeping Tcm."^° But Amy Lowell thought these poems "made up a great novel, greater even than Sons and Lovers.Interesting as the poems are as autobiography, they are more important as they reveal the strug­ gle of the poet towards his essential theme. He must achieve a full realization of himself before he can move beyond himself. We are less concerned with the Lawrence-Frieda relationship per se. much more concerned with what understanding Lawrence achieves as a result of this relationship.

The first real love poem in the volume is entitled "Bei Hennef"

(p. 203). The poem is interesting for the experimentation with rhythms as well as for its autobiographical revelation. It is relatively early since it first appeared in Love Poems (1913), but it is one of the first poems done in free verse.

Bei Hennef

The little river twittering in the twilight, The wan, wondering look of the pale sky, This is almost bliss. And everything shut up and gone to sleep, All the troubles and anxieties and pain Gone under the twilight.

39Vivian de Sola Pinto, "Introduction," Complete Poems, p. 8. 60w. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand (New York: Random House, 1948), p. 288. ^Pinto, "Introduction," Complete Poems, p. 8. 53 Only the twilight now, and the soft "Sh!" of the river That will last for ever.

And at last I know my love for you is here; I can see it all, it is whole like the twilight, It is large, so large, I could not see it before, Because of the little lights and flickers and interruptions, Troubles, anxieties and pains.

You are the call and I am the answer, You are the wish, and I the fulfilment, You are the night, and I the day. What else? it is perfect enough. It is perfectly complete, You and I, What more------?

Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!

The visual image provides the organizing principle of the poem, the image of the little river at evening with the cares of the world erased from the scene. The image calls up the appropriate emotional response, reinforced by the '’Sh!" sound in the third stanza. The fourth stanza provides the simile: my love is like the soft, quiet twilight, large, encompassing. The fifth stanza relies on repeti­ tion of words and verse pattern, as if fay repeating the clause patterns three times, the words will suddenly be true. The last verse of stanza five, "What more------?" tends to negate the perfection proclaimed earlier in the stanza, for apparently more is desired. The closing verse stanza "Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!" seems almost tacked on as an afterthought but clearly shows the conflict that occurs in reality: even the most perfect moment brings with it a contradictory sense of incompleteness or deficiency. However, the misgiving of the moment is well prepared for; the image in stanza one 54 is qualified, for the pale sky has a "wan” look, and the scene is

"almost bliss," not sheer bliss.

The excursion into free verse is fairly satisfactory. The

only stanza that jars is the fifth where the clause pattern is repeated

You are the call and I am the answer, You are the wish, and I the fulfilment, You are the night, and I the day.

The pattern cannot bear the burden of the content, not that the con­

tent is so profound, but simply that the pattern eclipses meaning.

On the other hand, the last stanza of the poem, a single verse set

off from the pattern, achieves a nice effect psychologically, an afterthought that places the content of the previous stanzas in a whole new light.

The next poem "First Morning" (p. 204) begins

The night was a failure but why not------? a failure because neither of the two people was free. The only shock is the insistence on a frank autobiographical revelation of the inti­ mate details of the relationship and the somewhat sad immaturity of the lovers. Paradoxically, the very weakness of the poem also becomes its strength for the poem has a ring of truth, and the truth carries a sad poignancy in its reminder of the inadequacy of so many human relationships. These two people are struggling to achieve a satisfac­ tory union of body and spirit which neither had yet experienced but which both apparently believed was possible. But the reader does feel rather like a "Peeping Tcm." 55 In "Frohnleichnam" (p. 209) Lawrence celebrates the lovers ' release frcm their pasts, and the satisfaction of their meeting in the present. The poem marks an important step forward in the rela­ tionship and in Lawrence's growth toward self-realization.

Frohnleichnam

You have come your way, I have come my way; You have stepped across your people, carelessly, hurting them all; I have stepped across my people, and hurt them in spite of my care. But steadily, surely, and notwithstanding We have come our ways and met at last Here in this upper room. Here the balcony Overhangs the street where the bullock-wagons slowly Go by with their loads of green and silver birch-trees For the feast of Corpus Christi.

Here from the balcony We look over the growing wheat, where the jade-green river Goes between the pine-woods, Over and beyond to where the many mountains Stand in their blueness, flashing with snow and the morning. I have done; a quiver of exultation goes through me, like the first Breeze of the morning through a narrow white birch. You glow at last like the mountain tops when they catch Day and make magic in heaven. At last I can throw away world without end, and meet you Unsheathed and naked and narrow and white; At last you can throw immortality off, and I see you Glistening with all the moment and all your beauty.

Shameless and callous I love you; Out of indifference I love you; Out of mockery we dance together, Out of the sunshine into the shadow, Passing across the shadow into the sunlight Out of sunlight to shadow.

As we dance Your eyes take all of me in as a communication; 56 As we dance I see you, ah, in full! Only to dance together in triumph of being together Two white ones, sharp, vindicated, Shining and touching, In heaven of our own, sheer with repudiation.

In free verse the line becomes the rhythmical unit of the poem. The poem is like a dance weaving in and out in a fluid manner. The state­ liness of the rhythms dispels any sense of shame or self-consciousness about the naked dancers who weave in and out of the sunlight. The rhythms of the dance are free flowing as a modem dance is free flowing rather than patterned as a minuet is patterned, thus the moment of the experience is captured in free-flowing harmony. The mood is sustained throughout the poem.

The first four stanzas bring the couple together as inexorably as are Will and Anna brought together in the wheat field where they put up sheaves of grain, a central episode in The Rainbow. In the poem the passing of the dancers from sunlight to shadow and back again is like the movement of the other two working in the moonlit wheat field.0

A brief excerpt of the latter scene must suffice, although the account takes up three full pages in the novel: They worked together, coming and going, in a rhythm, which carried their feet and their bodies in tune. She stooped, she lifted the burden of sheaves, she turned her face to the dim­ ness where he was, and went with her burden over the stubble. She hesitated, set down her sheaves, there was a swish and hiss of mingling oats, he was drawing near, and she must turn again, making her drift and ebb like a waver°3

see Langdon Elsbree, "D. H. Lawrence, Homo Ludens, and the Dance," The D. H. Lawrence Review I (Spring 1968), 1-30, for a dis­ cussion of the dance as a form of play. ^D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (London: William Heinemann Ltd., Phoenix Edition, 1957). p. 118. 57 While the poem and the novel are contemporaneous, the prose is clearly more effective. Tiverton is right; the intrusion of personal problems damages the poetiy. The poem is insistently autobiographical, and too frank for good taste, particularly in the first verse of stanza five.

Lawrence shouldn’t have to say "I have done;" his "quiver of exulta­ tion" should have been a sufficient explanation. However, the images, especially in stanzas three and four capturing the view from the balcony, are sharp and provide the needed touch of local color to place the poem in both time and space. More important to this study, however, is

Lawrence’s growth toward self-realization as revealed in the lines

At last I can throw away world without end, and meet you Unsheathed and naked and narrow and white.

Pinto sees the Look! poems as "an attempt to give expression to the drama of the psychological relationship between a newly-married husband and wife,"^* but beyond this ordinary drama are those addi­ tional conflicts and strains brought about by the illicit relation­ ship. The next poems, "In the Dark," "Mutilation," "Humiliation,"

"A Young Wife," all reveal the terrible tensions which separate or bind the couple in misery. She cries out: "There is something in you destroys me—!" (p. 210), and he responds:

I hold the night in horror: I dare not turn round, (p. 212) Do not leave me, or I shall break. Do not leave me. (p. 2l4) and The pain of loving you Is almost more than I can bear. (p. 215)

64 o Pinto, "Introduction" to Complete Poems. p. 8. 58 The relationship has its positive moments, too, symbolized by the

full blooming roses of "River Roses," "Gloire de Dijon," "Roses on the Breakfast Table," "I am Like a Rose," and "Rose of All the World."

Sometimes the rose is a rose, but the rose also symbolizes the per­ fected self for Lawrence, for he finally concludes that the rose is the meaning of the rosebush. In "Rose of all the World" Lawrence questions whether the rose exists for itself—purposeless, or for its seed. He concludes that it is enough for the rose simply to exist for itself; the rose blooms to achieve its own fulfillment of being; its seeds are a side issue. What Lawrence discovers is true of the rose he concludes is true of his own being. He too must fulfill him­ self, fulfill his being, come into bloom, and if possible, bring the relationship of man and woman into bloom: One rose of perfect wonderment upon the tree Of perfect life. Blossom, my darling, blossom, be a rose Of roses unchidden and purposeless; a rose For rosiness only, without an ulterior motive; For me it is more than enough if the flower unclose, (p. 219)

In these poems the rose works as image, as metaphor, and as symbol; however, the less intimate the experience, the more successful the poem. "Gloire de Dijon" (p. 217) for example need not necessarily depict Frieda, but is rather a perfect little vignette of a woman at her bath. The images is as clear as a painting:

. . . the sunbeams catch her Glistening white on the shoulders, While down her sides the mellow Golden shadow glows as She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts Sway like full-blown yellow Gloire de Dijon roses. 59 The image, most often a crystal clear visual image, is the organizing device in poems such as "A Youth Mowing," "Fireflies in the Corn," and "A Doe at Evening;" but the first and last of these three poems are spare and a-personal, and very good reading, while

"Fireflies" is personal and the emotions expressed seem to fulfill

Diana Trilling’s charge of "shallow and shoddy": "Look at the little darlings in the coral" and "—0 darling rye / How I adore you for your simple pride I" What a contrast these lines make with the restraint shown in "A Doe at Evening," the last two stanzas quoted here:

Her nimble shadow trotting along the sly-line, she put back her fine, level-balanced head. And I knew her.

Ah yes, being male, is not my head hard- balanced, antlered? Are not my haunches light? Has she not fled on the same wind with me? Does not my fear cover her fear? Lines like these anticipate Birds. Beasts and Flowers where lawrence reveals man’s relationship and alliance with another realm, the realm of nature. In a poem like "Sinners" the image is again used as an analogue.

Lawrence compares the action of the lovers analogously to the tx?es, to the dragon-flies, even to the mountains, all of which know no sin; he concludes: . . . —Ah, if only There were no teeming Swarms of mankind in the world, and we were less lonely! (p. 224) Nevertheless, the protagonist is overcome with his sense of sin revealed by his attempt at self-justification both in "Sinners" and in "Meeting 60 Among the Mountains" where he reads his own condemnation in the Christ

on the Cross:

I stand in a chill of anguish, trying to say The joy I bought was not too highly priced.

In the act of questioning the speaker condemns himself:

And I, as I stand in the cold, averted flowers, Feel the shame-wounds in his hands pierce through my own, And bfeathe despair that turns my lungs to stone And know the dead Christ weighing on my bone. (pp. 225-226)

Even the flowers avert their faces for his shame. The speaker reads

his condemnation in the eyes of Christ and in the eyes of society, and

he must come to terms with his own sense of guilt. Either he must

give over the woman or he must rationalize the rightness of his action.

He finally chooses the latter course, but at a terrible expense. The months ahead provide many bitter moments:

. . . The love so full Of hate has hurt us so, kfe lie side by side Moored . . . (p. 229)

What if I love you!—This misery Of your dissatisfaction and misprision Stupefies me. (p. 230)

Why should you ciy then? Are you afraid of God in the dark? (p. 231) And because you love me, think you do not hate me? Ha, since you love me to ecstasy it follows you hate me to ecstasy, (p. 235) and If despair is our portion Then let us despair. Let us make for the weeping willow. I don’t care. (p. 237)

Finally at the turn of the year, the hate dissolves. 61

Appropriately the new and hopeful relationship has its begin­ ning in "December Night":

The wine is warm in the hearth; The flickers come and go. I will warm your limbs with kisses Until they glow. (p. 237) and the positive change in the relationship develops through "New

Year's Eve," to New Year's Night,"

She's a silvery dove worth more than all I've got. Now I offer her up to the ancient inexorable God, Who knows me not. (p. 238). through "Valentine's Night," and "Birth Night," And the ugly, brutal years Are dissolving out of you, And the stagnant tears." (p. 24o) through the playful "Rabbit Snared in the Night," until we come to

"Paradise Re-entered." These poems celebrate the sexual encounter as sacrificial death which brings renewal. Finally in "Spring Morn­ ing" the bitter winter is past, the appropriate sacrifices have been made, the old selves slain, the rebirth accomplished; it is time to embark. The psychological drama unfolded by the poems will not be denied, but any intrinsic value it might provide is biographical in nature. Pinto's evaluation here is sound:. The sequence contains the material for a notable novel or autobiographical work, and I believe Lawrence would have been wellradvised to take a hint from Dante's Vita Nuova and cast it into the form of a prose narrative with inter­ spersed lyrics.65

^3Pinto, "Introduction" to Complete Poems, p. 8. 62 Too many of the poems are merely tedious. One is grateful for "Spring Morning" with its promise of a resolution: at last it is spring "—Vfe

have come through. / ... —But, did you dream / It would be so

bitter."

The announcement "We have come through" at the end of stanza

two of "Spring Morning" above is clarified in "History" which recounts

the history of the relationship. The poem concludes:

Your life, and mine, my love Passing on and on, the hate Fusing closer and closer with love Till at length they mate. (p. 248)

The hate and love fused is a reference back to the poem "Both Sid® of the Medal" from which came the lines "because you love me,/ think you you do not hate me?" The concluding stanzas of that poem need to be recounted here:

Since you are confined in the orbit of me do you not loathe the confinement? Is not even the beauty and peace of an orbit an intolerable prison to you, as it is to everybody? But we will learn to submit each of us to the balanced, eternal orbit wherein we circle on our fate in strange conjunction.

What is chaos, my love? It is not freedom. A disarray of falling stars coming to nought, (p. 236) 66 Is this not Birkin*s message to Ursula in Women in Love; but there is much more of this message still to be worked out.

66See especially Chapter XIII, "Mino," of Women in Love» Birkin says: "Oh, yes. Adam kept Eve in the indestructible paradise, when he kept her single with himself, like a star in its orbit." 65 Vfe move on to "Wedlock," a literal description of what the title

suggests, but most of the poem seems to be a rather silly posturing:

Come, my little one, closer up against me,

And, oh, my little one, you whom I enfold,

Ity little one, my big one My bird, my brown sparrow in my breast • •• • ••••••••«••••• But now I am full and strong and certain.

It simply takes too long to reach this state of certainty. Nevertheless,

the last section of the poem makes the poem worth reading:

VI

And yet all the while you are you, you are not me. And I am I, I am never you. How awfully distinct and far off frcm each other’s being we are!

Yet I am glad. I am so glad there is always you beyond my scope, Something that stands over, Something I shall never be, That I shall always wonder over, and wait for, Look for like the breath of life as long as I live, Still waiting for you, however old you are, and I am, I shall always wonder over you, and look for you.

And you will' always be with me. I shall never cease to be filled with newness, Having you near me.

Something rather strange and wonderful has happened to Lawrence the man as well as to Lawrence the poet as manifested by Section VI of "Wedlock" and made more explicit in "New Heaven and Earth," written

at Greatham between January and July 1915, in the first year of the

Lawrences' legalized union, finally finding the fullest expression in

"Manifesto" from Zennor where the Lawrences moved toward the end of 64 1915 and lived two bitter years till the close of the war. Not only has Lawrence learned how to write free verse, but he is freed to write free verse. The remarkable change which is apparent in his poetics occurs also in his prose during this same period, that is, the change in novelistic technique which occurs between Sons and Lovers and the two novels which follow: The Rainbow and. Women in Love. How shall we account for the dramatic change?

Obviously Lawrence has discovered something about love during this period which he had not known before. What is important to keep in mind is that Lawrence had been living with Frieda for over two years when he made his new discovery, thus while his discovery involves the sexual encounter, it cannot simply be reduced to that alone. Some biographical background will perhaps account for the breakthrough that occurs in both Lawrence’s philosophy and in his poetic technique at just this period between his legalized union with Frieda on July 13,

1914, to the end of the war in 1917. These war years were especially bitter for the Lawrences for a number of reasons. First, the couple were suspect because of

Frieda’s German origin, and their lusty singing of German songs in the evenings did not help allay suspicion. Secondly, Lawrence’s occupation, poet, must have struck his compatriots as something less than a patriotic wartime occupation; of course Lawrence had been rejected for military service more than once because of his poor health, but it is doubtful whether his neighbors knew that fact.

Also there was the problem of morality: Lawrence had eloped with another man’s wife, a woman willing to desert her three small children. 65 Consequently, the Lawrences were ostracized by their neighbors, suspec

ted of various subversive activities, harassed, and watched by the

police; finally they were moved inland as a precaution to prevent them

from signalling to German subs and landing craft.

The enforced isolation, however, provided Lawrence with plenty

of time for study and writing. In addition to writing poetry, working

on novels, short stories, and dramas, Lawrence also began work on a

"philosophical treatise" which became his Psychoanalysis of the Uncon­

scious (1921), and he began what was to become studies in Classic

American Literature (1922) which included an essay on Whitman and

perforce a closer analysis of Whitman’s "philosophy" as well as his

poetic technique. These war years, then, despite their bitterness, proved fruitful to the literary artist in Lawrence. They mark a distinct growth and change in both his philosophical outlook as well

as his literary style and technique. Until now Lawrence had been

almost perversely autobiographical and subjective in his content,

relatively traditional, with some experimentation, in his verse form.

Although the closing poems in Look! We Have Come Through 1 remain

insistently autobiographical—appropriate of course in that they con­

clude an autobiographical account of a developing relationship—the form changes almost radically, and the influence of Whitman’s poetic technique becomes visible if not audible. The enforced isolation of the couple also served to focus on and to cement that relationship. Indeed, for the most part, the two had only each other for comfort and companionship; they relied on one

another as a "tower of strength" (p. 249); they considered themselves 66 two against the world—sometimes defiantly as demonstrated by their singing German songs—evident in the poems "Song of a Man Who is

Loved" (p. 249), and again in "One Woman to All Women" (p. 251).

People became almost meaningless abstractions to Lawrence as when they are revealed by the light of a street lamp. In the poem entitled

"People" he concludes with the following lines:

. . . sickening the white Ghost-flux of faces that hie Them endlessly, endlessly by Without meaning or reason why They ever should be. (p. 252)

Naturally the Lawrences had a few loyal friends, but these years were war years, and the Lawrences remained relatively isolated; therefore, Lawrence looked to Frieda for comfort and companionship, and he shut out the bitterness of the ordinary world; he constructed a new world for himself and for Frieda, and he discovered a passage over to this new world.

In three poems, "The Song of a Man Who Hah Come Through," "New

Heaven and Earth," and "Manifesto," Lawrence sings of this new world and the passage to it. In the concluding poems to the volume he symbolically dismisses the old world in "Autumn Rain"—an elegy to the dead, and in "Frost Flowers"—a farewell to the living dead; and he looks forward to the new world to come in the final poem "Craving for Spring." The first inkling of this new world appears in "The Song of a

Man Who Has Come Through" from which the volume Look! We Have Come

Through! takes its title. The poem is both very important and also very beautiful; however, for it to yield up its fullest meaning, it 67 needs the context of all the other poems in the volume. It is a poem within a long poem.

The Song of a Man Who Has Come Through

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time. If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me t If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift! If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed Dy the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted; If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into ny soul, I would be a good fountain, a good well-head, Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression. What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody wants to da us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.

The image of the wind is delicate, invisible, fine, to borrow words from the poem; at the same time it is infinitely powerful, a chisel, a wedge, that will split a rock; yet there seems to be no contra­ diction. The speaker is the medium; he need only allow himself to be carried on the wind, to yield himself to the wind. He must let himself Be to Become what is intended for him. The poem uncovers the theme even as it obscures it. This new vision of Being brings with it a -wonder which the speaker is to record as it is experienced, but the nature of the experience is not as yet revealed. It is a new experience, with strange sounds which are associated with noises— 68 noises of the old world, but here in the new world the knocking

signifies "three strange angels" that must be admitted. One can

refuse to open the door out of fear, but in order to reach the

door at all one must be able to yield himself to the "wind that

blows through" his being. Then, upon reaching the door, he must

not be afraid to yield himself, to open the door to the strange

new experiencing.

The poem is beautifully cadenced, nothing forced or strained,

the sound perfectly echoing the sense. Lawrence capably communi­

cates the wonder, the awe, the strangeness of the experience; yet

he makes it perfectly concrete when he introduces the knocking in

the third stanza; he retains the effect of strangeness, however, by

revealing the angels at the door, but then he dispels all fear as he urges, "admit them, admit them."8?

"New Heaven and Earth" and "Manifesto" help elucidate the meaning of "The Song of a Man Who Has Come Through." Despite their

great length, both poems merit a close scrutiny since these poems

are central to an understanding of Lawrence’s developing theme. But

it must also be noted straight away that neither of these long poems

is good poetry. 8?Robert Hogan provides one explanation of the three angels. He identifies them as Hespere, Aegle, and Erytheis, the three daugh­ ters of Atlas and Hesperis, who is the daughter of Hesperus. Hesperus "is the star sacred to the love goddess Aphrodite." Thus Hogan says the "three strange angels" are "the Hesperides, whan the poet and his woman have been seeking. In other words, the poet and the wcman have, after struggle, cane through to equanimity, understanding and conjugal bliss." Robert Hogan, "Lawrence's ’Song of a Man Who Has Come Through',"-Explicaiac, XVII (April, 1959). 51. 59 The very title "New Heaven and Earth" indicates that it is

intended as a revelation. It is comprised of eight sections, 143

lines. In Section I we discover the speaker has "all alone" crossed

over "into another world," a world that is peopled but with "unknown

people," a world without tears, for the tears belong to the old

world.

In Sections II and III the speaker tells of the utter horror

of the old world where he found himself in everything, himself crea­

tor, himself created,

people, houses, streets, vehicles, machines, nations, armies, war, peace-talking, work, recreation, governing, anarchy,

for even ideas and abstractions are man created. Worse yet, the

speaker says even nature itself is "tainted" with man—the "skies,

trees, flowers, birds, water,"—for man pollutes the skies and the water, he transplants trees and flowers therby moving the birds, and

he plucks his own creation, swims in his own polluted streams, breathes

the air he has polluted, watches himself destroy his own flesh in wars

he has created for himself, with cannon he has created for his own

destruction. This portion of the poem is a kind of anti-Whitman,

anti-"Song of Myself," a negative celebration of man. It can only

end in absolute destruction as seen in Section IV. There must be a

sufficiency of death, a sacrifice equal to the horror which man has wrought on himself: War came, and every hand raised to murder; very good, very good, every hand raised to murder! Very good, very good, I am a murderer! It is good, I can murder and murder, and see them fall, 70 the mutilated, horror-struck youths, a multitude one on another, and then in clusters together smashed, all oozing with blood, and burned in heaps going up in a foetid smoke to get rid of them,

The stanza continues that many lines again with images of hideous

gaping dead, but Lawrence has lost his reader. He does not communi­

cate why all this mayhem and murder is "very good, very good," when

obviously it is veiy bad both for the reader and the speaker; he is unable to arouse empathy of any kind. Only the more determined reader would read to the end of the stanza where he discovers the speaker himself achieves his own death and is "trodden to nought."

We have witnessed a grand judgment day, but man has wrought his own destruction. Not until the horror has been absolutely negated, brought to nothing, can there possibly be hope for renewal or resur­ rection, and no suggestion of hope is offered in Section IV.

However, in Section V the resurrection has miraculously taken place; we are not told how, only that When I am trodden quite out, quite, quite out, every vestige gone, then I am here risen, accomplishing a resurrection risen, not born again, but risen, body the same as before, . . . still terrestrial nyself, the same as before, yet unaccountably new.

The poetry fails to communicate the wonder; it merely says discursively that the miracle has taken place. The next section, Section VI, attempts to recount the miracle, but again the poetry fails to communicate the wonder of the experience despite the poet’s efforts. When the speaker discovers the "unknown," he gloats: 71 I am the first comer! Cortes, Pisarro, Columbus, Cabot, they are nothing, nothing! I am the first ccmer! I am the discoverer! I have found the other world!

The whole show merely becomes ridiculous when it is reduced to a

prosaic account, for we are told the speaker put his hand out, he

felt something "which was not I,/ it verily was not I,/ it was the unknown." A blaze leapt up, he was like a tiger (Blake’s tiger?), greedy, and "mad for this unknown." When he discovered the "unknown," he reveled in it:

I am thrown upon the shore. I am covering myself with the sand. I am filling my mouth with the earth. I am burrowing my body into the soil. The unknown, the new world! and what he touched "was the flank of my wife," the opening line of

Section VII. But while Lawrence often exhibits a fine sense of humor, he is quite serious here.

It was the flank of my wife I touched with my hand, I clutched with my hand, rising, new-awakened from the tomb! It was the flank of my wife whom I married years ago at whose side I have lain for over a thousand nights and all that previous while, she was I, she was X; I touched her, it was I who touched and I who was touched. Yet rising from the tomb, from the black oblivion stretching out my hand, my hand flung like a drowned man's hand on a rock, I touched her flank and knew I was carried by the current in death risen, not to the old world, the old, changeless I, the old life, wakened not to the old knowledge but to a new earth, a new I, a new knowledge, a new world of time.

Something very remarkable took place, a miracle, a revelation, an experience achieved for the first time. It is simply too easy an 72 explanation to reduce the experience to a sexual encounter for the

speaker after telling us that what he touched was "the flank of my

wife," hastens to add that this is not the first time, for they have

lived together for more than three years. Obviously he would not

eliminate the sexual aspect either. What he has discovered is the

realm of the "other," that other of which he has no part, a gross

oversimplification, of course, but at least an approach to what Law­

rence is attempting to ecmmunicate. He continues;

Ah no, I cannot tell you what it is, the new world. I cannot tell you the mad, astounded rapture of its discovery.

The vision is larger than the poet, beyond communication, he suggests.

The final stanzas, Section VIII, reveal the fertility of this new world with its "green streams" in the land that beats with a pulse, and the speaker feels swept away into the very source of the mystery itself. Sedtion VIH is a kind of "Kubla Khan" filled with rich sensual images suggesting orgasm of an almost cosmic nature.

We note the "sacred river," the "deep romantic chasm which slanted /

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!" the "woman wailing for her demon lover," and the

. . . ceaseless turmoil seething As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail all this frcm Coleridge's vision is suggested again by Lawrence in

Section VIII of "New Heaven and Earth." 73 VUI Green streams that flow from the innermost continent of the new world, what are they? Green and illumined and travelling for ever dissolved xd.th the mystery of the innermost heart of the continent, mystery beyond knowledge or endurance, so sumptuous out of the well-heads of the new world.—

The other, she too has strange green eyesl White sands and fruits unknown and perfumes that never can blow across the dark seas to our usual world! And land that beats with a pulse! And valleys that draw close in love! And strange ways where I fall into oblivion of uttermost living!— Also she who is the other has strange-mounded breasts and strange sheer slopes, and white levels.

Sightless and strong oblivion in utter life take possession of me! The unknown, strong current of life supreme drowns me and sweeps me away and holdsme down to the sources of mystery, in the depths, extinguishes there my risen resurrected life and kindles it further at the core of utter mystery.

The speaker has achieved the passage with another, but paradoxically he remains alone.

It remains for "Manifesto" to help unravel the mystery.

"Manifesto" also is comprised of eight sections of unequal length, l60 lines in all. It sets forth Lawrence’s doctrine of Being.

Obviously the poem is autobiographical, confessional in the extreme, but it is also a revelation of Lawrence’s vision of what can be. It is a restatement of the vision which Birkin attempts to communicate to Ursula in Wbmen in Love when he tells her of his conception of the term "love."®®

Women in Love, pp. 165-168. 7* The first sections of "Manifesto" are a series of thanks­ givings. In Section I Lawrence gives thanks that he has not had to

experience a fear of hunger. In Section II he gives thanks that he has not had to fear the elements. In Section III he gives thanks that he has not been lacking books—access to the wisdom of mankind. These first three sections discuss successive fears one might perceive as he grows toward maturity. The concluding stanza of the third section is a thanksgiving for a sufficiency of food, and clothing, and books.

I have eaten, and drunk, and warmed and clothed my body, I have been taught the language of understanding, I have chosen among the bright and marvellous books, like any prince, such stores of the world’s supply were open to me, in the wisdom and goodness of man. So far, so good. Wise, good provision that makes the heart swell with love.

The diction, the tone, the rhythm are suitable for a thanksgiving; the

"so far, so good" suggests inventory but also transition.

In Section IV the young man becomes aware of another deep hunger which at first he generalized as a need for "woman, indis­ criminate woman," but which he came to realize required cm woman:

"What many women cannot give, one woman can;" and therefore, Section V must be a thanksgiving for that one woman who brings fulfillment.

Obviously that woman is Frieda, for the closing stanza of Section V indicates that the speaker has had to defy mankind in order to have that particular hunger satisfied:

So another hunger was supplied, and for this I have to thank one woman, not mankind, for mankind would have prevented me; but one woman, and these are my red-letter thanksgivings.

And Section V closes the succession of thanksgivings. 75 Sections VI, VII, and VIII penetrate to the moment of Being-

in-the-process-of-Becoming, to the NOW moment in time, to the

experiencing of the experience which Lawrence achieves in his

relationship with the particular woman. Section VI opens with

Hamlet’s question:

To be, or not to be, is still the question. This ache for being is the ultimate hunger.

But Lawrence is not, like Hamlet, contemplating actual suicide, but metaphorical death. In the 1916 version of "Snapdragon” he revised the end of that poem to say "And death, I know, is better than not- to-be," and both in "Snapdragon" and "Manifesto" Lawrence uses "death" in the Elizabethan sense as well as in a very modern, phenomenological

sense. He says in stanza two of Section VI:

I have cone, as it were, not to know, died, as it were; ceased from knowing; surpassed myself. and in stanza three:

It is a kind of death which is not death. It is going a little beyond the bounds.

it wounds me to death with my own not-being; definite, inviolable limitation, and something beyond, quite beyond, if you understand what that means. It is the major part of being, this having surpassed oneself, this having touched the edge of the beyond, and perished, yet not perished.

In the modern sense of death Lawrence is talking about the existen­ tial being in the process of experiencing. Man must allow being to occur, "come, as it were, not to know," to experience a death of self in order to come up against what is the "other." One cannot know the future, should not know definitely what awaits on the other side of 76 the door. Thus we return to the closing stanzas of "Song of a Man

Who Has Come Through":

What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.

One must not be afraid to admit experience when it offers itself.

When man is fully occupied with experiencing, he is not aware of himself, he surpasses himself, moves ahead of himself; and therefore, experiencing is properly described as a "kind of death which is not death," in a phenomenological sense. Obviously Lawrence is discussing a sexual orgasm with the one woman in "Manifesto" for it is in a sexual experience that Lawrence apparently achieved his first insight into being. Later Lawrence will extend the experience of Being-lost-in- experiencing beyond the sexual act, but here in "Manifesto" as in

"New Heaven and Earth" the metaphors are those commonly used for dis­ cussing the orgasm.

In Section VII Lawrence wants for the woman what he has experi­ enced for himself, this caning up against an other, for only when one has realized an other can he positively postulate his own separate individual being. Descartes opened the question when he wrote;

"Cogito. ergo sum." and thereby postulated his own being. But Lawrence would have it: "I am, not because I think but because I feel." Nevertheless, Lawrence is still confronted with the Existen­ tialist's dilemma that resulted from Descartes' assertion: how can

I postulate the being of another separate frcm myself? 77 In the early version of "The Wild Common" Lawrence had tried to postulate his being as one alive in an alive universe, one with the universe, but he had not yet wrestled with the possibility that the universe might exist as a product of his imagination, himself the creator, the existentialist position. He takes up this problem in

"New Heaven and Earth" and is horrified when he finds himself the creator as well as the created of himself, the very problem of exis­ tentialism. Then in the night some three years or more after he had first encountered Frieda, he discovers the solution to the problem when he finally permits himself to be lost in Being:

Plunging as I have done, over, over the brink I have dropped at last headlong into nought, plunging upon sheer hard extinction: I have come, as it were, not to know, died, as it were; ceased from knowing;

Only when we cease to "know" mentally, when we let ourselves "Be," do we become lost in the experiencing. Later we can attend back to the moment of the experiencing, recall it, record it; but to be aware, to be recording during the experience is to change the experi­ ence, to color it with the past, to order it, or to prevent it. Man is afraid to let himself Be, to let himself go, but Lawrence came to believe that only when man let himself Be was he fully alive, was he free. Man has a choice: "To be or not to be, is still the question," and each individual can choose for himself whether he will follow Lawrence into this new realm of experiencing, each one alone, com­ pletely freed: 78 It is in pure, unutterable resolvedness, distinction of being, that one is free, not in mixing, merging, not in similarity.

Lawrence is paring away at his theme in lines like these, trying to discover the very nature of Being, what it means for a man to Be.

The discoveries he has made in these last poems about Being negate an earlier assertion in this veiy volume of poems in "Nonentity" where he expressed the desire to be one with the stars, the wind, and the grass, "not to be/ Any more myself." In these closing poems of the volume, however, he rejects all merging once and for all.

The concluding section, Section VIII, sings of the newly discovered freedom:

After that, there will only remain that all men detach themselves and become unique, that we are all detached, moving in freedom more than the angels, conditioned only by our own pure single being, having no laws but the laws of our own being.

Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled. Every movement will be direct. Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faces when we think of it lest our faces betray us to some untimely fiend. Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassing singleness of mankind. The blazing tiger will spring upon the deer, undimmed, the hen will nestle over her chickens, we shall love, we shall hate, but it will be like music, sheer utterance, issuing straight out of the unknown, the lightning and the rainbow appearing in us unbidden, unchecked, like ambassadors. (italics mine) Just like the lily and the sparrow, man will finally experience a fulfillment of being moment by moment, living straight from the pure singleness of being. The poem concludes: 79 We shall not look before and after. We shall be. now. We shall know in full. We, the mystic NOW.

Lawrence says "we shall know in fuHn with a knowledge that is beyond and above an intellectual knowing, for intellect implies past and future, but in the moment of Being there is only the "NOW" and the

"NOW" is mystical in that it is out of time. It is its own justi­ fication simply because it is. it exists. It is a more complete kind of knowing than intellectual knowing because it combines both the mind and the body in perfect harmony, the rational and the emotional, the spiritual and the sensual, each contributing to the unity of the moment in the individual Being.

No wonder Lawrence sang Whitman’s praises for he felt Whitman alone understood this liberation into being, the soul tucked back into the body, one with the body, and the morality "a morality of actual living, not of salvation.Lawrence concluded that

Whitman’s essential message was the Open Road. The leaving of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and to the loan of the open road. Which is the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself.70 In Whitman Lawrence discovered the moral justification he needed to sanction his action with Frieda; he achieved liberation fran the society that had rejected him by placing himself back in the natural world, analogous with the flower, experiencing pure Being as man

yStudies in Classic American Literature, p. 185. 7°Ibid.. p. 187. 80 must have done before he came to be mentally conscious and created rules for himself that curbed his spontaneous being.

It follows then that if man lives straight from his singleness of being in order to let experience occur, with "every movement . . . direct," without "laws but the laws of our own being, . . . issuing straight out of the unknown," then poetry, too, must be allowed to issue in the same way, "straight out of the unknown" following its own laws, "poetry of the sheer present, . . . life surging itself into utterance at its very well-head."^ Consequently, Lawrence forged a poetics that corresponded to his philosophy of Being his metapsychology. But Lawrence submits that the experience comes first, then comes the interpretation of the experience into a rational pattern;

The novels and poems come unwatched out of one’s pen. And then the absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one’s experience as a writer and as a man. The novels and poems are pure passion­ ate experience.?2

Of course he recognized that each man’s very experiencing is shaped by an ordering principle, a "metaphysic." The metaphysic or philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated and may be quite unconscious, in the artist, yet it is a metaphysic that governs men at the time, and is by all men more or less comprehended, and lived. Men live and see according to sane gradually developing and gradually withering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea or metaphysic—exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and art.73

^"Poetry of the Present," in Complete Poems, p. 183. ^"Foreword" to Fantasia. pi 57.

?3lbid. 81

We have been observing this gradually developing vision as it reaches statement in the poems to 1917. In these last poems in particular the poet has worked at unfolding his dynamic idea of being-in-the-process-of-becoming, and he has attempted to explain his poetic principle as well.

Not only did Lawrence absorb Whitman’s philosophy of the "Open

Road" as the only pathway for the soul to follow, but Lawrence adopted some of Whitman’s poetics as Lawrence understood them. Pinto says of this period in Lawrence’s development that Lawrence

had now developed a peculiar kind of free verse which owes something to Whitman and probably also the Old Testament poetry in which he had been steeped in his youth.?*

Pinto’s observation is correct on both counts although Lawrence’s debt is probably first to Whitman and secondarily through Whitman to Whitman’s source of rhythms, the English Bible.?5 of course we know that Lawrence was well read in the Bible, but if that source had been a primary source of rhythm, those rhythms would have been apparent in some of the earlier poetry. We are on safer ground to assume that Lawrence made a study of Whitman’s poetry during his enforced isolation during 1915-1917, became fascinated by Whitman’s philosophy as it applied to Lawrence’s personal situation, postu­ lated his "poetry of the present," and wittingly or unwittingly

?%into, Crisis, p. 156.

75Gay Wilson Allen, American Prosody (New York: American Book Company, 1935), pp. 220-1; and Bliss Perry, Whit Whitman (Boston: Houghton, 1906), p. 96. See also James E. Miller, Jr., Karl Shapiro, and Bernice Slote, Start With the Sun: Studies in the Whitman Tradi­ tion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, i960). 82 emulated Whitman's rhythms, the most obvious of which was parallelism. However, Kenneth Rexroth comments of Lawrence's debt and resemblance to Whitman that the poems

look like Whitman on the page. But if read aloud with any sort of ear, they don't sound much like him. Whitman . . . isn't rhetorical in the invidious sense ... he says what he means, but he says it in the language of that lost art of elocution so popular in his day. There is little of this in Lawrence. At this period his long-lined free verse is derived almost entirely from the poetiy of the Bible ... 7° and he comments further that in Lookl We Have Come Through! "Lawrence was just beginning to learn to write free verse" and he is not always

"completely successful."

Auden comments that as Lawrence "himself acknowledged, it was through Whitman that he found himself as a poet, found the right idiom of poetic speech for his demon."77 But Auden also notes that the resemblances are superficial. Whitman, of course, uses a persona.

"Cn the other hand," Auden comments, "it is doubtful if a writer ever existed who had less of an artistic persona than Lawrence," and it is for this reason that Auden at times feels like a "Peeping Tom."7®

Lawrence's particular debt to Whitman, then, is less to Whit­ man's poetics than to a general poetic license in metrics and in experiencing. Just as Whitman placed his faith in the Open Road for the soul, so Lawrence had the necessary assurance for his developing

7^Kenneth Rexroth, "Introduction" to D. H. Lawrence; Selected Poems (New York: The Viking Press, 1959). P* 13«

77Auden, p. 287.

. 288. 83 concept of being, the individual making his way down the Open Road—

and the Open Road extended to the poetics as well.

Look! We Have Come Through! is clearly transitional then. It

recounts Lawrence’s struggle to achieve a new plateau of awareness,

his struggle to reach his underlying theme, his relatedness to the

universe, and to do that, he had to analyze minutely his relationship

with his wife, no matter what the cost. The poems are innovational

in that they present the reader with the task of providing the con­

tinuity that links the poems one by one, each poem representing a moment of experience that when taken together reveal the flux of a

relationship between man and woman. Pinto captures the defect of

these poems succinctly: "No one can doubt that these poems record

intense and moving experiences with complete honesty and integrity,

but they fail to turn these experiences into aesthetic experience for the reader. That job still lay ahead of Lawrence as he and

Frieda set off down the Open Road.

79Pinto, "Introduction," Complete Poems, p. 10. CHAPTER IV

MAN AND NATURE

In keeping with the new-forged philosophy of the Open Road— that is, leaving themselves open to experience,80 the Lawrences left

England at the close of World War I. The poems of Birds, Beasts and

Flowers (1923) provide a natural record of the Lawrences’ travels between 1917 and 1923 through Germany, Italy, Sicily, Ceylon, Aus­

tralia, the United States, and Mexico. But of far greater importance than the itinerary for the journey is Lawrence's theory of Being as revealed in the poems, for the poems are not simply little nature

studies. They are about more than birds, beasts and flowers; they are about man. Lawrence looked at nature to discover the cosmic plan of which all living creatures are a part in hopes of finding man's proper place in that scheme. He had a conviction that at same stage in man's evolution the species had taken a wrong turn. Lawrence wanted to examine in his own way some more "primitive" civilizations than his own—the one that had produced the war-devastated Europe of

1917; but one may doubt that he himself knew what he expected to find.

Rather, he went seeking clues to the nature of Being at its most ele­ mental level.

80 At the conclusion of Women in Love we find Ursula and Birkin also prepared to follow the call of the Open Road, leaving themselves open to experience. It is interesting to see that Connie and Mellors at the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover have only some rather vague plans about heading for Canada, but this vagueness about destination is in keeping with the doctrine of spontaneity, keeping oneself open to experience. 85 Lawrence categorized the poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers into nine divisions representing a poetic parallel of the biological time scale as the outline will show;

Fruits : Pomegranate Peach Medlars and Sorb-Apples Pigs Grapes (all from San Gervasio) The Revolutionary (Florence, Italy) The Evening Land (Baden-Baden, Germany) Peace (Taormina, Sicily)

Trees : Cypresses Bare Fig-Trees Bare Almond-Trees Tropic Southern Night (all from Taormina)

Flowers Almond Blossom (Fontana Vecchia) Purple Anemones Sicilian Cyclamens Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers (all from Taormina)

The Evangelistic Beasts: St. Matthew St. Mark St. Luke St. John (San Gervasio)

Creatures : The Mosquito (Siracusa, Sicily) Fish (Zell-am-See) Bat Man and Bat (Florence)

Reptiles: Snake (Taormina) Baby Tortoise Tortoise Shell Tortoise Family Connections Lui et Elie Tortoise Gallantry Tortoise Shout Birds: Turkey-Cock (Fiesole) Humming-Bird (Espanola) Eagle in New Mexico (Taos) The Blue Jay (Lobo) 86 Animals: The Ass He-Goat She-Goat (Taormina) Elephant (Kandy, Ceylon) Kangaroo (Sydney) Bibbles (Lobo) Mountain Lion (Lobo) The Red Wolf (Taos)

Ghosts: Men in New Mexico (Taos) Autumn at Taos (Taos) Spirits Summoned West (Taos) The American Eagle (Lobo)

An overview of the above divisions provides a clue to Lawrence’s method.

The poems are related one to another within each division, as we shall see, and each division falls within a regular pattern. Lawrence had good reason to begin with fruit, for example, rather than trees; and while the "creatures” may seem out of place on a scientific biological time scale, for Lawrence’s purpose they are precisely where they belong.

Thus the poems are linked one to another as they chronicle the essential being of living things—beginning with the seed which is in the fruit, but always as that essential being relates to the condition of modern man.

Each of the nine divisions is given a lyrical introduction which helps link the various poems in that section to a particular theme. Of

"Fruits" Lawrence says: For fruits are all of them female, in them lies the seed. And so when they break and show the seed, then we look into the womb and see its secrets. So it is that the pomegranate is the apple of love to the Arab, and the fig has been a catch-word for the female fissure for ages. I don’t care a fig for it! men say. But why a fig? The apple of Eden, even, was Eve’s fruit. To her it belonged, and she offered it to the man. Even the apples of knowledge are Eve’s fruit, the woman’s. But the apples of life the dragon guards, and no woman gives them. ... "No sin is it to drink as much as a man can take and get home without a servant’s help, so he be not stricken in years." (p. 277). 87 In keeping with his developing theory of Being, Lawrence examined

the fruit and extended its meaning analogously to man. Eve offered

Adam the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, "Eve’s fruit,

the woman's," (Eve comes from the Hebrew "life"), but the "apples of

life the dragon guards." Although man was expelled from the garden

lest he eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life, still Lawrence must

examine what fruit has been given man and come at what secrets he can

elicit, good or evil. Hence the close examination in "Figs" (pp. 282-284).

The problem with "Figs," as with the other poems in this section,

is that it is overladen with meaning. It is about figs, but it is also about woman, about knowledge of good and evil, about how to live and how not to live, about past and present civilizations. The poem bears a heavy burden—too much for a fig, really—of suggested truths, none of them made explicit, the relationship among the parts not made clear.

The poem, even while it is free verse, seems to lack ary kind of organ­ izing principle other than a free and loose association of ideas, almost as if the poet is merely musing. The fruit of the fig tree is female.

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig fruit:

Fig, fruit of the female mystery, convert and inward, but when the fig becomes over-ripe, it explodes, it is finished.

Modern women are like the fig, baring their secrets, but not until they have the mental knowledge of what life is all about. They cannot act spontaneously. Now they sew fig-leaves not to hide their nakedness as did Eve, but rather to adorn. They have come at the knowledge, but unnaturally, for the knowledge is in the mind, not in the body where 88 it belongs.They laugh and mock at the Lord’s indignation. The women are like over-ripe figs, they have burst with self-assertion; and burst figs won't keep in ary clime.

As with other poems in this section, then, "Figs" begins with speculation about the fruit at hand; next an analogy is drawn or suggested regarding the fruit as an expression of the female; then a comparison is made between what is now and what had been before man was expelled frcm the Garden; and finally a suggestion is made that civilization may be doomed if man continues on his present course.

Not every poem; in this section follows the above outline of "Figs," but taken together the poems all contribute in one way or another to the outline.

The fruit is primary, then, for the seed which it produces.

The problem for man is that he has eaten the forbidden fruit, has acquired knowledge, and subsequently has so badly misused that knowl­ edge: all the Eves of the world as soon as they realize in their minds as "Eve once knew in her mind that she was naked," all these modern-day Eves

. . . stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it. They have nakedness more than ever on their mind, And they won't let us forget it. (p. 284)

The men, too, have misused knowledge, epitomised by America in her ideal "exaggerate love" and the "machine-uprisen perfect man," as

SlFor a full discussion of this view, see Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. pp. 8-9, and Part III, "Love, Sex, Men, and Women," of Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. edited by Edward D. McDonald (New York: The Viking Press, 1936; reissued 1968), pp. 151-214. 89 Lawrence shows in "The Evening Land" (p. 289). Lawrence sees himself as a "blind Samson" in his poem "The Revolutionary" (p. 287) his mission to bring down the pillars that are "holding up this ideal civilization." His images of light and dark operate in this poem as they so often do elsewhere to reinforce the idea that modern light­ skinned man is machinelike in his response to life whereas long ago

"Gods were dark-skinned/ . . . But it’s so long ago, the ancient

Bushman has forgotten more utterly than we, who have never known"

(p. 286). The theme that links these poems together is simply that once man responded with deepest sensitivity, naturally, with all his being to his environment

But long ago, oh, long ago Before the rose began to simper supreme, Before the rose of all roses, rose of all the world, was even in bud, Before the glaciers were gathered up in a bunch out of the unsettled seas and winds, Or else before they had been let down again, in Noah’s flood, There was another world, a dusky, flowerless, tendrilled world And on the margin, men soft-footed and pristine, Still, and sensitive, and active, Audile, tactile sensitiveness as of a tendril which orientates and reaches out, Reaching out and grasping by an instinct more delicate than the moon’s as she feels for the tides, (p. 285) but then man ate of the apple; he became aware of good and evil; he became conscious of self; and he gradually evolved into a "horrible, skeleton, aureoled ideal," a "weird bright motor-productive mechanism."

Men have become "painful, harsh-surfaced pillars that give off nothing except rigidity," so that the "blind Samson" cries out: See if I don’t bring you down, and all your high opinion And all your ponderous roofed-in erection of right and wrong, Your particular heavens, With a smash, (p. 289). 90 The machine is the fruit of modern man—cold and sterile; and man has

allowed himself to become an extension of the machine so that even his

actions are automatic, mind directed and cold, rather than spontaneous,

rising up from the heart, warm as was intended.

The message of decay in "Fruit" is reiterated in "Trees," made particularly clear in the prose introduction:

It is said, a disease has attacked the cypress trees of Italy, and they are all dying. Now even the shadow of the lost secret is vanishing from earth. "Empedokles says trees were the first living creatures to grow up out of the earth, before the sun was spread out and before day and night were distinguished; from the symmetry of their mixture of fire and water, they contain the proportion of male and female; they grow, rising up owing to the heat which is in the earth, so that they are parts of the earth just as embryos are parts of the uterus. Fruits are excretions of the water and fire in plants."0

The trees stand for much more than trees in the eye of the poet for they contain vast dark secrets of which man is only dimly aware. In

"Cypresses" (p. 296) the trees serve as reminders of what is past, what is lost—the Etruscan civilization, "rare and orchid-like," denied by a "virtuous" Rome.8^ The poem implies a primitivism, a past, lost golden age succeeded ty civilizations in a long process of degeneration. In "Bare Fig-Trees" (p. 298) and "Bare Almond-Trees"

82Lawrence is quoting from John Burnet's, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Adam and Charles Black, probably the first edition, 1892, or the second edition of 1908), a gift frcm Bertrand Russell sometime in 1916 while Lawrence was in Cornwall. This book had a strong influence on Lawrence's developing concept of Being as is obvious from the intro­ ductions to the poems where Lawrence quotes frcm Burnet, as well as in the poems. According to Aldington, Lawrence "delighted in this work and was influenced by it considerably." See Richard Aldington, D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius But . . . (London: William Heinemann, 1950), p. 162. 83 See D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places (London: Martin Seeker, 1932; available in paperback from New York: The Viking Press, 1957). 91 (p. 300), trees made of nude silver or of black rusted iron thrust

themselves from the earth and commune with the sky. These trees are

vitally alive despite their nudity, assured in their being, making

vital exchange between the earth and what is outside themselves.

Lawrence is not posturing when he says in "Bare Fig-Trees"

Let me sit down beneath this man-branching candelabrum The Jewish seven-branched, tallow-stinking candlestick kicked over the cliff And all its tallow righteousness got rid of, And let me notice it behave itself.

And watch it putting forth each time to heaven, Each time straight to heaven, With marvellous naked assurance each single twig, for he observes attentively, intensively, as few poets have cared to do. Auden contrasts this trait of Lawrence's with Whitman's practice:

Whitman looks at life extensively rather than intensively. No detail is dwelt upon for long; it is snapshotted and added as one more item to the vast American catalogue. But Lawrence in his best poems is always concerned intensively with a single subject, a bat, a tortoise, a fig tree, which he broods on until he has exhausted its possibilities.®^

This intensity of observation is particularly marked in the poems of

Birds. Beasts and Flowers. Kenneth Rexroth comments: He seems to have lived in a state of total realization—the will and its power, positive and negative, at maximum charge, and all the universe streaming between them glowing and transformed. The work of art grows in that electric field, is a 'function* of it. . . . The craft is the vision and the vision is the craft. Completely without self-consciousness, Lawrence can ask an almond tree

What are you doing in the December rain? Have you a strange electric sensitiveness in your steel tips?

wAuden, p. 288. ®3Rexroth, p. 15. 92 Do you feel the air for electric influences Like seme strange magnetic apparatus? Do you take in messages, in some strange code, From heaven’s wolfish, wandering electricity, that prowls so constantly round Etna? Do you take the whisper of sulphur from the air? Do you hear the chemical accents of the sun? Do you telephone the roar of the waters over the earth? And from all this, do you make calculations? (p. 301) and in the context of the poem the questions seem completely appropri­ ate because the poet is always going beyond the thing-in-itself to the relationship that links all things one with another, that great "living

QZ unconscious" in which eveiything participates. He is convincingly sincere because he is merely telling his vision here rather than insisting on it, as so often he is likely to do.

Two poems which have nothing directly to do with trees but which relate to them are included in this section, "Tropic" (p. 301) and

"Southern Night" (p. 302), both of which draw a distinction between what is of the south, of the sun, red, yellow, hot and dark, versus the cold, "bitter-stinging white world" of "northern memories." The distinction between the northern and southern worlds—the northern world representing the cold, mechanized civilizations in contrast with the southern world representing the warm, spontaneous civilizations, themselves passing—this distinction which finds its articulate formu­ lation in these poems becomes vitally important to Lawrence in this period of his development.^7 One of the drums which Lawrence heard

oz Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, pp. 12-17. ®7This north-south opposition is treated symbolically in Women in Love through images of snow, machinery, Gerald’s essential nature, all in opposition to the African statuette, spontaneity, etc. 93 down the Open Road was a call from a lost civilization which Lawrence

believed, while it flourished, had found its strength in spontaneous

being. The cypress trees serve as mute reminders of these lost civili­

zations, but even the cypress trees are dying out as the cold mechan­

ization of the north creeps southward.

The third section, entitled "Flowers," is introduced by a long prose poem:

And long ago, the almond was the symbol of resurrection. But tell me, tell me, why should the almond be the symbol of resurrection? Have you not seen, in the wild winter sun of the southern Medi­ terranean, in January and in February, the re-birth of the almond tree, all standing in clouds of glory? Ah yes! ah yes! would I might see it again! Yet even this is not the secret of the secret. Do you know what was called the almond bone, in the bocfy, the last bone of the spine? This was the seed of the body, and from the grave it could grow into a new body again, like almond blossom in January. No, no, I know nothing of that. "Oh Persephone, Persephone, bring back to me from Hades the life of a dead man." "Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans!" saith Snpedokles. For according to some, the beans were the beans of votes, and votes were politics. But others say it was a food- taboo. Others also say the bean was one of the oldest symbols of the male organ, for the peas-cod is later than the beans-cod. But blood is red, and blood is life. Red was the colour of kings. Kings, far-off kings, painted their faces vermilion, and were almost gods. (p. 303) Lawrence again and again dwells on the need for rebirth which will bring the new heaven and earth which he had glimpsed earlier. Of course Lawrence turns again to the miracle of rebirth in nature as an analogue for what is possible for man. In "Almond Blossom" (p. 304) he begins with the miracle of the blossom on what appears as naked iron. What is possible for the almond-tree in December is possible for man in a December civilization if he will let the miracle happen, <$b for Even iron can put forth, Even iron.

This is the iron age, But let us take heart Seeing iron break and bud, Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom.

Lawrence was now certain that cold mechanization meant; the death of this civilization. Nevertheless, in "Almond Blossom" he takes com­ fort in the thought that the bare, black almond branch, despite its appearance of cold, black iron, can burst forth with life. The allu­ sions to Gethsemane and the Cross juxtaposed with the allusion to

Etna, are meant to suggest death and resurrection, but a rebirth that is greater than the understanding called forth by use of either the pagan or Christian allusion by itself. The poet stands in awe before the miracle. He calls upon both pagan and Christian symbols in order to communicate the universality of the miracle of rebirth. When the fig branch and the almond branch look dead, unpromising, as they did in the previous section "Trees," suddenly there appears the blossoms

Flaked out and come unpromised, The tree being life-divine, Fearing nothing, life-blissful at the core Within iron and earth. The next question, of course, asks from where the blossoms come, and the response is seen in a Dionysian song praising spring, "Purple Anemones" (p. 307). Not from heaven, but from out of the underworld come the blossoms, out of Hades, out of Dis. Here Lawrence mixes references to Reman and Greek mythology just as deliberately as he juxtaposes Jesus with the pagans, for in any culture flowers mean fer­ tility: but they spring up from below; they are not dropped from heaven. 95 In "Sicilian Cyclamens" (p. 310) man emerges from his cave,

a Mediterranean savage, along with the new budding cyclamen, and not

much different in nature, Lawrence would suggest.

But in "Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers" (p. 312) Lawrence delivers

a polemical political address against modern "-ists," for in contrast

with the Mediterranean savage who emerged with the new budding cycla­

men, a group of modern socialists have appropriated the flower to an

unnatural use as symbol of their beliefs. In a parody of the nursery

rhyme about beggars in rags and tags, Lawrence chides;

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark! It's the socialists come to town. None in rags and none in tags, Swaggering up and down.

They are dressed no differently than, others, "the same unremarkable

Sunday suit," but they wear the salvia and hibiscus flowers in their buttonholes to mark their allegiance to a "cabbage-idealistic level of equality."

What rot, to see the cabbage and hibiscus-tree As equals! What rot, to say the louts along the Corso In Sunday suits and yellow shoes Are my equals! I am their superior, saluting the hibiscus flower, not them. The same I say to the profiteers from the hotels, the money-fat-ones Profiteers here being called dog-fish, stinking dog-fish, sharks, The same I say to the pale and elegant persons, Pale-face authorities loitering tepidly; That I salute the red hibiscus flowers And send mankind to its inferior blazes. ° ®®William York Tindall, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow (New York; Columbia University Press, 1939)» writes a chapter entitled "Law­ rence Among the Fascists," pp. 162-180, in which he asserts Lawrence has fascist leanings. For a repudiation of such charges see Mary Free­ man, D. H. Lawrence; A Basic Study of His Ideas (Tallahassee, University of Florida Press, 1955)» pp. 189-20?. 96 Let the bolshevists pull the world down for it is coming to an end in any case, Lawrence says; but he adds plaintively:

And still I cannot bear it That they take hibiscus and the salvia flower.

The pattern of "Flowers" follows that of "Fruits" and'Trees.”

At first Lawrence seems to be commemorating a cyclamen, as he had the peach and the cypress; then he begins to extend back in time to a pre­ laps arian state:

Eve, in her happy moments, Put hibiscus in her hair and contrasts that natural state of being with the degeneration of the modern period in all its mechanism, materialism, and idealism; finally he forecasts a total destruction, usually fay fire. Thus it would seem that these poems about fruit, trees, and flowers, are in reality about man’s fall from a state of nature into a state of auto­ mation, mechanization, and impending destruction. Lawrence's finest poetry stems from his passionate belief in man as a creature of God, but man sprung up frcm the earth, not brought down from the heavens. Man emerged as did the flowers. Man, too, could reach his full flower, his full fruition, provided that he allowed all aspects of his being their fullest expression. Empedocles' doctrine of the struggle between Love and Strife underlies Lawrence's concept of being. Bnpedocles believed that in the original condition of the universe, Love, a smooth mixture of the elements, reigned supreme. When Strife entered, the elements began to separate—like elements merging with like. Cbly the power of Love brings a co-mingling 97 again. However, as Strife gained the upper hand, the tendency to separate became greater than the tendency to come together.

According to Empedocles, trees were the first living things to grow out of the earth, and in them the sexes were still conjoined.

Animals, too, came into being undifferentiated by sex or species.

When Strife became more powerful than Love, the separation by sex and species took place; that is, like attracted like. What was a smooth mixture of male-female-lion-oxen-eagle separated into man, woman, lion, lioness, and so forth. Still Love had the power to attract the opposites back to their original state. Male would unite with female; and man continues to yearn for the strength of the ox, the power of the lion.

Furthermore, Empedocles also believed—again his belief is based on the principle of attraction—that man thinks with his blood,®9 especially the blood around the heart, because in blood we find the smoothest mixture of the elements. The elements in the blood respond to like elements from the outside. If Strife controls, then like yearns toward like; however, if Love is dominant, then opposites yearn for the return to the smooth mixture of Love which was the original state long ago. Lawrence took a poetic view of Empedocles * account. He had postulated his "belief in the blood, the flesh as being wiser than the intellect"^0 several years before he had received a copy of

^Empedocles, quoted in Burnet, p. 232.

9°d. H. Lawrence in a letter to Ernest Collings, dated 17 Jan­ uary, 1913. 98 of Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy. He believed that man was the

product of natural forces, but because creation is of God, the natural

forces must be acting for the good of man. Man is a free agent in that he can determine for himself how he will respond, for he has two kinds of knowledge: first, there is the knowledge which he has in his body, the blood-conscious awareness of himself, of his needs and desires; second, there is the knowledge which he derives from his power of reason.9^- Important is the fact that blood-conscious knowledge is primary; its call is the first call. The power of reason is secondary; it can mediate between the call and the response. But Reason’s powers are tremendous: it can permit a natural response; it can prohibit any response; it can alter, weaken, deaden, or magnify what would otherwise be a blood-conscious, and for Lawrence, a natural, and therefore, the proper response.

Lawrence would not deny reason altogether. He was well aware of the important role reason must play, for the function of reason was to aid the blood-consciousness in attaining its claims rather than to interfere with the knowledge which the blood transmitted. He believed that Love was a necessary corrective in the universe, but he insisted that the love must take place at the human level, must start as love between man and woman. If Lawrence had stopped at this point, then he would be saying

93,See especially Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. pp. 48-49; Fantasia in its entirety. See also "Mb Need One Another,” Phoenix, pp. 188-195. 99 that the mere sexual act would be sufficient to transform the world

into one smooth mixture of Love; but his concept of Love far tran­

scended sensuality, for he insisted that Love involved the whole being

in total communion with a partner. To separate sensuality and spiri­

tuality was an act of Strife; to operate in the harmonious marriage of

sensuality and spirituality was an act of Love. For man to be most fully man, then, he must act out of this totality of being, a being that did not deny his natural sensuality nor exaggerate his spirituality.

Furthermore, Lawrence did not advocate a return to the state of pure

Love, a smooth mixture of elements; rather, he desired a state of balance which takes into account the claims of both Strife and Love.

In this delicate balance between the demands of Strife and Love man reached his fullest being, a state that demanded he interact—at the human level—with all of Nature, the birds, the beasts, the flowers, as participants in God's creation. The introduction to the section entitled "The Evangelistic

Beasts," then, is a plea for a restoration of a natural order:

Oh put them back, put them back in the four corners of the heavens, where they belong the Apocalyptic beasts. . . . Lawrence is speaking of the four beasts—man, lion, ox, and eagle—of Ezekiel i, 5-12, which have been differentiated into the beasts of Revelations iv, 7, mediated by Christ. Until the primal order is restored in heaven, man will be unable to be at peace/ The four

^see Lawrence's Apocalypse (Florence: G. Orioli, 1931) for a complete discussion. Much of Lawrence’s theory of Being finds expres­ sion for the first time in Birds, Beast and Flowers but is elaborated on at length in the Apocalypse. See expecially pages 255-256 for the identification of the four beasts with the four Gospels. 100 beasts are of course identified with the four Gospels: "St. Matthew"

(p. 320) represents man confronting the Savior, uplifted in the morn­ ing, but confronted by his manhood at night. "St. Mark" (p. 323) after 2,000 years is now become a very old lion, filled with pride, and swollen with self-conscious awareness; he is no longer "a blood­ thirsty king of beasts" but instead he is now tamed,

. . . the faithful sheep-dog of the Shepherd, thinking of his voluptuous pleasure of chasing the sheep to the fold And increasing the flock, and perhaps giving a real nip here and there, a real pinch, but always well meant.

"St. Luke" (p. 325) is the ox, sapped of his powers;

Since the Lamb bewitched him with that red-struck flag His fortress is dismantled His fires of wrath are banked down His horns turn away from the enemy.

Is he not over-charged by the dammed-up pressure of his own massive black blood Luke, the Bull, the father of substance, the Providence Bull, after two thousand years? and finally "St. John" (p. 328) is the eagle, the intellect, knowing everything, "Proud intellect, high-soaring Mind" which needs to be brought back down to earth Make it roost on bird-spattered, rocky Patmos And let it moult there, among the stones of the bitter sea.

Lawrence would have the old eagle come down to earth for it too needs to experience a rebirth: The poor old golden eagle of the word-fledged spirit Moulting and moping and waiting, willing at last For the fire to burn it up, feathers and all, So that a new conception of the beginning and end Gan rise from the ashes. Ah Phoenix, Phoenix, John’s Eagle! You are only known to us now as the badge of an insurance Company. 101 Phoenix, Phoenix, The nest is in flames, Feathers are singeing, Ash flutters flocculent, like down on a blue, wan fledgeling.

Of the four poems in this section, "St. Matthew" best expresses man’s dilemma as Lawrence saw it, for Matthew is man while Jesus is Son of Man. Man yearns to be lifted up by the Holy Spirit, but because he is fully man, he yearns to face downward, too. He is torn between the two extremes, fullest and complete spirituality, fullest and complete sensuality; being fully man, he must achieve a balance between the extremes on the human level. Elsewhere, for example in the story "The Man Who Died,"93 Lawrence expresses more explicitly the point that

Christ never experienced the demands of sensuality placed on man, and therefore Christ can never completely understand the human condition;

He makes greater demands on man than man can satisfy. Lawrence felt it was as wrong for man to be too spiritual as to be too sensual.

Hence Lawrence’s great quarrel with Christ which manifests itself here in "The Evangelistic Beasts" and elsewhere in his writings,9^ a quarrel which Lawrence never resolves as later poems attest.

"St. Mark" is the lion tamed by Christ. "St. Luke" is the ox, the powerful sacrificial animal, whose great procreative powers have been pent up for over 2,000 years but are now about to burst forth in a declaration of war on the world as a result of the restraint. "St. John" is the proud, knowing intellect that has soared high in the

93see "The Man Who Died" in St. Mawr and The Man Who Died (New York: Vintage, 1959» the most readily available edition). 9^lbid.; see also Apocalypse (also available in paperback frcm Viking Press, 1966). 102

realms of the spirit and failed to recognize the claims of the mundane

world. Lawrence would have the eagle taste the fire from which it can

rise again transformed, truly resurrected as the mythical Phoenix. He

would turn loose the pent-up energy of the ox. He would have the lion

roar, king of the beasts once more. He would let man resume his dual

nature, let him respond naturally to the claims of the spiritual prop­ erly balanced by the claims of the sensual nature of man.

Lawrence placed the "Evangelistic Beasts" in the center of Birds.

Beasts and Flowers in order to point up the contrast between the four

great elemental beasts of Ezekiel which had filled the heavens, and

the tamed and degraded beasts skulking through the revelation of John

of Patmos, and by this contrast to reveal the point at which man had

taken a wrong turn.

Having explored the four corners of heaven, Lawrence next directs his attention to the elements, following Empedocles' division into Water,

Earth, Fire, and Air. In "Creatures" Lawrence examines two of these realms: water and air. Everything must fulfill its own nature; it must be what it is,

and not try to be what it is not. Thus in "Creatures" we discover: "But fishes are very fiery, and take to the water to cool them­ selves." To those things that love darkness, the light of day is cruel and a pain. Yet the light of lamps and candles has no fears for them; rather they draw near to taste it, as if saying: Now what is this? So we see that the sun is more than burning, more than the burning of fires or the shining of lamps. Because with his rays he hurts the creatures that live by night, and lamplight and firelight do them no hurt. Therefore the sun lives in his shining, and is not like fires, that die. In the poems of this section, Lawrence examines the mosquito, the fish, and the bat, each for what it is in its own realm, then he depicts 103 man’s attitude toward the creature. What is uniquely Lawrencean is

the exploration of the being of the creature in relationship to the

being of man. Neither the creature nor man is considered the superior

being even though in the end the swatted mosquito is but a dim dark

smudge. In the final analysis what Lawrence reveals is his tremendous

respect for God’s creation so that even the mosquito assumes a dignity

which man usually reserves for himself. The mosquito is not made

heroic, but it assumes the full dignity of mosquito-ness.

In "Fish" (p. 334) the speaker contemplates what it means to be

a fish, to be completely submerged in another element, to be a part of another alien world. What the speaker learns from his contemplation

of fish is . . . I am not the measure of creation. This is beyond me. this fish. His God stands outside my God.

Man and fish are worlds apart, occupying different realms, ruled over

by different Gods: He was born in front of my sunrise, Before ny day Fishes With their gold, red eyes, and green-pure gleam, and under-gold, And their pre-world loneliness, And raore-than-lovelessness Fish are before and beyond man. Man can only stand on the bank and peer in toward the fish’s being. Suddenly man realizes that he can

not know fish, and this intuition is the real knowledge. The fish belongs absolutely to another real, the realm of water. 104 Bats and mosquitoes belong to the realm of air. In "Bat”

(p. 340) the speaker discusses bats in general, but in "Mosquito”

(p. 332) and "Man and Bat" (p. 342) we find the two in actual combat.

In the latter poem a real drama of the blind battle which ensues between man and a trespassing bat develops. Finally the bat, spent with exhaustion, drops into a heap. The speaker contemplates the huddled form debating what to do:

Ah death, death You are no solution! Bats must be bats.

It is these tremendous recognitions—that each creature has a being which it must fulfill, that man has a being which he must fulfill, that man and creatures are both creations of God or of Gods, that man and creatures must exist in relationship, that there is a mosquito and bat realm—Air, and a fish realm—Water, and a man realm comprised of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and that these realms coexist and overlap, that man is NOT the measure of all things, that fish, for example, preceded man—these recognitions reveal the strength and beauty.of Lawrence’s developing conception of being.

The sections that follow trace the evolutionary pattern: reptiles, birds, animals, and finally man—ghosts of past civili­ zations. Lawrence had to go back beyond "Revelations" to the myths of the Greeks and Hebrews, and retrace the patterns within the old framework of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Empedocles and Heraclitus.

Lawrence begins the section entitled "Reptiles" with another quotation, this one iron Heraclitus: 105 "Homer was wrong in saying, 'would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!' He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe* for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away"—for in the tension of oppo­ sites all things have their being—(p. 348)

According to Empedocles who followed Heraclitus, the tension existing between the forces of Love and Strife accounted for the present indi­ viduation of beings, for Love is a smooth mixture of the four elements— earth, air, fire, and water—while Strife is the complete separating of the four elements into four layers; at either extreme, Being, as we know it, would not exist. The introduction to the "Reptiles" section continues:

For when Fire in its downward path chanced to mingle with the dark breath of the earth, the serpent slid forth, lay revealed. But he was moist and cold, the sun in him darted uneasy, held down by the moist earth, never could he rise on his feet. Ahd this is what put poison in his mouth. For the sun in him would fain rise half-way, and move on feet. But moist earth weighs him down, though he dart and twist, still he must go with his belly on the ground. . . .

The first poem of this section is the well-known "Snake"

(p. 349) in which is depicted an encounter between man and snake at a water trough. What Lawrence is suggesting in both his introduction and in the poem is that the snake is from another realm of being. The universal order is Empedoclean again, comprised of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, with their four qualities, cold, dry, hot, moist. Just as the fish belongs to the realm of water, the mosquito and bat to the realm of air, so the snake belongs to the bowels of the earth. But the snake emerges from the black hole to share the water trough with man just as the mosquito and the bat emerge into the air space of man. None of these creatures deliberately seeks out io6 man, not even the mosquito which is out for blood indiscriminate.

In actuality what takes place in each instance is an encounter; a relationship is established.

"Snake," then, describes the encounter of man with a being from another realm, and the snake arrived there first. The snake is golden,

Sicilian, emerged from an alive Etna, subjected by his moist, cold nature, but resentful of that nature, hence venomous. But for Law­ rence, the golden venomous snake is far more glorious than the inno­ cent black non-poisonous variety which goes its way without rebellion, hence without poison. Despite his admiration, his voice of education

I says the snake must be killed. The speaker, however, fears the snake.

Not until the snake begins its withdrawal into his dark underworld can the speaker move.

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole, Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after, Overcame me now his back was turned.

He throws a stick at the retreating body, and immediately regretted his paltry action: For he seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again. The other poems of the "Reptile"section concern turtles. Lawrence says of turtles in the introduction to the section: The wise tortoise laid his earthy part around him, he cast it round him and found his feet. So he is the first of creatures to stand upon his toes, and the dome of his house is his heaven. Therefore it is charted out, and is the foundation of the world, (p. 348) 107 Lawrence began Birds, Beasts and Flowers with things botanical—fruits, trees, and then flowers; he began the zoological study with the four

Evangelistic Beasts; he moved next to an examination of creatures that exist in realms distinct from man: fish in water, and bats and the mosquito in air; finally he ccmes to reptiles where he first examines snake since its realm is the bowels of the earth, and finally he comes to the turtle, the "first of creatures to stand upon his toes" with the chart of the world on his back. What a picture of existential being! to carry the whole heavens on your back everywhere you go; to look out on a world, to encounter it beneath your feet, and before your beak, to move dimly between earth and sea, at home in either element—this is the realm of the turtle, the baby turtle, all by itself moving out from the egg, a

Challenger, Little Ulysses, fore-runner, All life carried on your shoulder, Invincible fore-runner, (p. 353)

In the tortoise series of poems Lawrence depicts a whole history of what it means to be in our realm. "Tortoise Shell" (p. 354) is a

Christo-pagan mythological depiction of the universe on the shell of a turtle. The Cross penetrates clear through the turtle for it is visible on the top shell as it is on the under-shell, and the agony of the Cross penetrates the fiber of the poet, too, when he says;

The Cross, the Cross Goes deeper in than we know Deeper into life; Right into the marrow And through the bone. 108 The greater part of the poem, however, is taken up with a Pythagorean awe of the numerical divisions of the tortoise shell. Thus all the

secrets of the universe, Christian and pagan, are spelled out on the tortoise:

The Lord wrote it all down on the little slate Of the baby tortoise. Outward and visible indication of the plan within, The complex, manifold involvedness of an individual creature Plotted out On this small bird, this rudiment, This little dome, this pediment Of all creation, This slow one.

The poet follows the growth of the turtle, observes the exis­ tential being of the turtle in "Tortoise Family Connections" (p. 356) and "Lui et Elie',' (p. 358), notes the approaching adolescent stage in

"Tortoise Gallantry" (p. 362), with its unknowing knowledge of male­ ness, and follows the tortoise through its extremity of orgasm in

"Tortoise Shout" (p. 363). In the series of turtle poems we follow the turtle fran its first emergence from the egg to its fulfillment as it completes the cycle of being in an act of love.

"Tortoise Shout" is remarkable both in content and form. More than in any other poem in this volume, the device of parallelism serves here as basic structure. The opening lines begin: "I thought . . . I said . . . Yet I've heard . . . ." This kind of repetition occurs again and again in the poem. Heretofore the structure of all the poems has been almost exclusively organic, the lines building on one another with no discernible pattern, no regular meter, no rhyme, although parallelism is used from time to time, sometimes as a repe­ tition with variation as in "St. Matthew." 109 I, Matthew, am a man.

I, Matthew, being a man

I am man. I am man, and therefore . . .

I am Matthew, the man,

Matthew I am, the man.

I am Matthew, the Man:

But I, Matthew, being a man

But "Tortoise Shout" is marked by parallelism from beginning to end, rhythm built on rhythm, line on line, accruing power as the poem pro­

ceeds toward its climax. The poem records a turtle’s first orgasm in terms of the unexpected, unbelievable turtle scream. Super-audible, From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth Giving up the ghost, Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.

The turtle's scream is linked to primal noises of other times and places in a series of parallel statements coming one on top of the other, piling up to a crescendo, then dropping off again. I remember, when I was a boy, I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake; I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring; I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters; I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startles the depths of my soul; I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight; I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible; I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats; I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning, no And running away from the sound of a woman in labour, something like an owl whooing, And listening inwardly to the first bleat of almb, The first wail of an infant, And my mother singing to herself, And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death, The first elements of foreign speech On wild dark lips.

And more than all these, And less than all these, This last, Strange, faint coition yell Of the male tortoise at extremity, Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life.

Man and beast in the extremities of life, in birth, in death, in contentment, in distress, in orgasm, in mystical communion with God, in going apart and in coming together: each experience brings with it its own utterance which is both more and less than speech. Inter­ rupting the nine "I remember" statements by bringing the "Cry loudly" over to the margin reveals the powerful poetic intelligence which created these lines. Finally, Lawrence links these utterances together in an Empedoclean universe:

Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement, Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found. Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost, The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment, That which is whole, torn asunder, That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe. The coming together and the separating out in Love and Strife provide the daily cataclysms to which man responds immediately and vocally with sounds that go deeper than words. Ill The poems classified under "Birds," "Animals,"and "Ghosts," most of them written in the United States, do not achieve the force

and splendour of "Tortoise Shout," although Lawrence canes close to

capturing and communicating that unnameable spirit which pervades the

mountains and inhabitants of New Mexico even today. But generally,

the closer Lawrence comes to the realm of modern man, the less he likes

what he sees; therefore the tone of the poetry changes accordingly.

Of "Birds" Lawrence says:

Birds are the life of the skies, and when they fly, they reveal the thoughts of the skies. The eagle flies nearest to the sun, no other bird flies so near. So he brings down the life of the sun, and the power of the sun, in his wings, and men who see him wheeling are filled with the elation of the sun. But all creatures of the sun must dip their mouths in blood, the sun is forever thirsty, thirsting for the brightest exhalation of blood. You shall know a bird by his cry, and great birds cry loud, but sing not. The eagle screams when the sun is high, the peacock screams at the dawn, rooks call at evening, when the nightingale sings. And all birds have their voices, each means a different thing, (p. 368)

Lawrence treats the turkey, the humming bird, the eagle, and the blue

jay as representatives of the various stages of evolution. The turkey of "Turkey-Cock" (p. 369), Lawrence suggests, might be the chosen "bird of the next dawn" representative of the reawaken­ ing primitive Indian civilizations of America, especially of Mexico, in contrast with the peacock which represents the dead East and mori­ bund European civilizations. One can note the difference between the strut of the peacock contrasted with the

. . . turkey prancing lew on earth Drumming his vaulted wings, as savages drum Their rhythms on long-drawn, hollow, sinister drums. 112 Surely the turkey seems to be more primitive than the peacock, Law­ rence suggests. He contrasts the turkey's "amazing mantilla of oxydised sky-blue/ And hot red" which suggests "something unfinished/

A bit of slag still adhering, after your firing in the furnace of creation," with the peacock's "diadem"—the peacock representing the

"dead letter" East and "Europe moribund," and the turkey representing

"those sombre, dead, feather-lustrous Aztecs, Amerindians." But Lawrence is still not satisfied that the turkey is quite finished, quite ready to stand representative finally, for the poet asks:

. . . must you go through the fire once more, till you're smelted pure, Slag-wattled turkey-cock, Dross-jabot?

The poems of this period reveal the primitivistic bent in

Lawrence's thinking. The approach is mythical rather than logical and materialistic. The clue resides in the references to Empedocles. Lawrence's insistence on Love needing to be balanced by Strife makes sense in an Empedoclean cosmology, as does Lawrence's frequent ref­ erence to purification by fire as seen in "Turkey Cock" above and in "Eagle in New Mexico" (p. 372). To test his theory of being, Lawrence sought out primitive civilizations, concentrating on those under the sun, for he theorized that those men living closest to the sun were in closer connection with the life-giving force, provided of course that they had not destroyed their vital connection with the sun. Lawrence had postu­ lated in 1921, prior to his departure for Ceylon, Australia, and

America, that U3

the quick of the sun is polarized with the living, the sun's quick is polarized in dynamic relation with the quick of life in all living things, that is, with the solar plexus in man­ kind. . . . the sun is the great fiery vivifying pole of the inanimate universe.95

Thus, the eagle of "Eagle in New Mexico" (p. 3?2) is the sun bird, his beak dripping with blood, his breast thrust toward the sun, "Sun- breaster." Then the questions:

Why do you front the sun so obstinately, American eagle? As if you owed him an old, old grudge, great sun: or an old, old allegiance.

Is your continent cold from the ice-age still, that the sun is so angry? Is the blood of your continent somewhat reptilian still, That the sun should be greedy for it Qblood] ?

Lawrence links the temperament of a people with the condition of their civilization. In New Mexico, in America, Lawrence sees a "nervous people," for the sun had sucked up the blood of these people. But the people need not be slaves to this condition, for

Even the sun in heaven can be curbed and chastened at last By the life in the hearts of men. And you, great bird, sun-starer, heavy black beak Can be put out of office as sacrifice bringer.

The concentration of the eagle's breast as "Sun-breaster" and even on the turkey's breast, that "throbbing mass of generous breast," is linked to the condition of man in that the blood of man is linked to the fire, and the fire to the sun in the Ehipedoclean cosmology. But the fire in the breast of man can go out to man in an act of Love as Lawrence made clear in his volume of poems Look! We Have Ccme Throught

93pantasia. p. 184. 114 It ought not to be sucked up by the sun. According to the Empedoclean

cosmology, in the state of Love, opposites attract, while in a state

of Strife, like attracts like. Vie noted above that the fire in the

breast of man attracts and goes out to like fire which would indicate Strife; however, the strife is counterbalanced in an act of Love where

opposites attract, man and woman are linked together. In a universe

where Love is overbalanced by Strife, life as we know it will pass

away as the elements separate, like attracting like. On the other hand in a universe where all is Love (and is not this lawrence 's

great quarrel with Christ, that Strife would be excluded) life as we

know it would pass away because the elements would blend into a smooth

mixture. To maintain a harmonious balance between Strife and Love

then is man's goal, the goal of the individual and the goal of indi­

viduals in a society.

Man must be sure to expend his fire in a creative act rather

than have that fire vitiated by the sun, for note how the sun saps man's energy. Man could utilize his energy positively in two direc­ tions: in the creative sexual act with woman, or in an act of male

creative power—an exertion of manhood in the world as we know it, as in leadership for example.98 Lawrence was very sure of the first means; he searched the world over to ascertain the validity of the second means. He looked to the animal kingdom to discover what he could learn that might apply to man.

98Fantasia, p. 157. Two novels, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent, attempt to work out this idea in the world of man. 115 The introduction to "Animals" is comprised of three quotations

from antiquity. The first of these, from Xenophanes needs no comment.

"Yes, and if the oxen or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds." (p. 3?6)

The second quotation refers to Enpedocles* belief in the transmigration of souls:

"Once, they say, he was passing by when a dog was being beaten, and he spoke this word: 'Stop! don't beat it! For it is the soul of a friend I recognized when I heard its voice."' (p. 376)

And the voices of the animals in this section are the voices of man: the asses bray, the dogs bark; in their voices, in their actions, we read the state of man. The third quotation is from Heraclitus, "Swine wash in mire, and barnyard fowls in dust."

Lawrence places "The Ass" (p. 377) first in his collection of animals, deliberately, crudely, for the ass symbolizes the predica­ ment of any beast which falls "into the rut of love . . . the knowl­ edge of love." Elsewhere^7 Lawrence writes that the trouble with mankind today is that love is reduced to "sex in the head." Man has the same problem as the ass: All his soul in his gallant member And his head gone heavy with the knowledge of desire And humiliation. Hence Lawrence sees the ass as an appropriate animal for Jesus, "Love on a submissive ass." Except that the ass will not forget what might have been since he is a primal creature; therefore, he emits his

^7"Pornography and Obscenity," Phoenix, pp. 170-187; see especially p. 182. 116 long-drawn bray, "All mares are dead!" and "He regrets something that he remembers." Either

All mares are dead! Or else I am dead! One of us, or the pair of us, I don’t know-ow-! -ow!

Lawrence would have the reader draw the human analogy. Spontaneity

and natural response are no longer possible when man thinks with his

head rather than his heart.

"He Goat" (p. 380) follows "The Ass," and he, too, is head heavy, domesticated.

. . . they’ve taken his enemy from him And left him only his libidinousness,

Take away the fire, and all that is left is the knowledge of what

might have been: "The goat is an egoist, aware of himself, devilish

aware of himself." The only way out of the dilemma is to

Find an eneny, Egoist, and clash the cymbals in face-to-face defiance, And let the lightning out of your smothered dusk. Forget the female herd for a bit, And fight to be boss of the world. Fight, old Satan with a selfish will, fight for your selfish will: Fight to be the devil on the tip of the peak Overlooking the world for his own.

Again Lawrence is speaking to man as he discusses the stinking billy goat’s problem. Man too must be less aware of himself and more con­

cerned with male activities in the world of men. Lawrence has a word for the ladies, too, in "She Goat” (p. 383).

She is certainly a real enough goat, "bought at Giardini fair . . . for

six hundred lire," but she is female, "rock of cold fire," "sheer will,"

"libidinous magnetism," for even when "the billy goat mounts her/ She is brittle as brimstone." 117 In Sicily Lawrence found asses and goats in place of the sun- men he was seeking; therefore, he moved on to Ceylon where he observed

a royal ceremony in progress. Tribesmen and elephants came to pay

their respects to the Prince. Unfortunately the Prince was no Prince

at all but merely "a weary, diffident bey whose motto is Ich dien./

I serve" (p. 391). Man and beast had come to pay their respects to the

Prince expecting to hear repeated the

Royal summons: Dient Ihrt Serve! Serve. vast mountainous blood, in submission and splendour. serve royalty. but they went away in dejection for there was no royalty to serve, only a boy repeating

I serve! I serve t in all the weary irory of his mien—*Tis £ who serve 1 Drudge to the public. only a weary diffident boy in place of a royal prince who should be commanding homage saying to the men:

Serve me, I am meet to be served. Being royal of the gods.

And to the elephants: First great beasts of the earth. A prince has come back to you. Blood-mountains. Crook the knee and be glad. No royalty, no sun-man in Ceylon; therefore, Lawrence moved on to

Australia. "Kangaroo" (p. 392) records the state of Australia’s civiliza­ tion as represented by the kangaroo who 118 . . . watches with insatiable wistfulness. Untold centuries of watching for something to come, For a new signal from life, in that silent lost land of the South.

Wistfully watching, with wonderful liquid eyes And all her weight, all her blood, dripping sack-wise down towards the earth's centre,

Leap then, and come down on the line that draws to the earth's deep, heavy centre.

Australia lay silently waiting in 1922 for a new cycle of life to begin. Lawrence found Australia interesting but unrewarding for the purposes of his search.

Then on to New Mexico and the great democracy partly exempli­ fied by "Bibbles" (p. 395), the little dog who adopted Lawrence. Oh Bibbles, black little bitch, I'd never have let you appropriate me, had I known. I never dreamed, till now, of the awful time the Lord must have, "owning humanity, Especially democratic live-by-love humanity.

But the little dog insists on remaining a little dog and fails as an analogue for either democracy or woman although these analogies slip in and out of the poem. "Bibbles" is intended as an attack on Whit­ man's idea of love as a "merging," as a loss of self in mass identity: Believe in the One Identity, don't you You little Walt-Whitmanesque bitch? for Lawrence's theory of being demands individuality, singleness of being, pure, isolated being caning into relationship with other being 98 but not merging with that other being in love indiscriminate.-7

^See Bernice Slote's "The Leaves of D. H. Lawrence" in Start With the Sun .... especially pp. 83-87. 119 But Bibbles runs away with the poem as she comes

Pelting behind on the dusty trail when the horse sets off home at a gallop: Lectin the dust behind like a dust-ball tearing along, Coming up on fierce little legs, tearing fast to catch up . . .

In "Mountain lion" (p. 4-01) we encounter two dark Mexicans

smiling foolishly over a dead mountain lion they had slain that morn­

ing, and the poet reflects that another lord of life is disappearing:

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion. And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans And never miss them. Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of that slim yellow mountain lion I

Of the animals, then, with only "The Red Wolf" (p. 4-03) remaining, we discover the deadened asses, the libidinous goats, the elephants gone submissive, the kangaroo not yet brought to life, the little dog bitch that is love indiscriminate, and one ex-lord of life in the dead moun­ tain lion. There remains "The Red Wolf" who has come full circle, search­ ing the sun, east and east and east, until he beholds the last sun disappearing over the "rim of the far-off mesa," saying as it goes: . . . Look for a last long time then! Look! Look well! I am going. The sun disappears leaving the speaker confronting a "dark old demon" Indian. The speaker, obviously Lawrence, asks to be taken in, but he is rejected with the question: Where’s your God, you white one? Where’s your white God?

Thin red wolf of a pale-face. Thin red wolf, go home. 120 Then the Indian slips off into the night for he is called "Star-road," leaving the speaker to muse:

Since I trotted at the tail of the sun as far as ever the creature went west, And lost him here, I’m going to sit down on my tail right here And wait for him to come back with a new story. I’m the red wolf, says the dark old father. All right, the red-dawn-wolf I am.

Believing that he had come close to the answers to his questions, Lawrence squatted and awaited the "Ghosts" as his introduction to that section shows;

And as "the dog with its nostrils tracking out the fragments of the beasts’ limbs, and the breath frcm their feet that they leave in the soft grass," runs upon a path that is pathless to men, so does the soul follow the trail of the dead, across great spaces. For the journey is a far one, to sleep and a forgetting, and often the dead look back, and linger, for now they realise all that is lost. Then the living soul comes up with them, and great is the pain of greeting, and deadly the parting again. For oh, the dead are disconsolate, since even death can never make up for some mistakes, (p. 406) The meeting between white man and red man in "The Red Wolf" is just such a painful encounter between unlike souls.

But the poems of this section go beyond the encounter of living men; they treat of intimations of immortality suggested by the phras­ ing "to sleep and a forgetting." "Men in New Mexico" (p. 407) captures the spirit of that vast country in its first image*.

Mountains blanket-wrapped Round a white hearth of desert— In the presence of these mountains man recognizes his insignificance for the mountains are absolutely imperturbable. They do not yield themselves in any way to man. They do not present themselves as an obstacle to be overcome, to be scaled, to be mastered, to be subdued. 121 They exist. Man glimpses them and recognizes their supremacy. He

learns to live in that land as master only by pretense for in reality

there can be no question which is master. The mountains brood silently- waiting.

In "Autumn at Taos" (p. 408) Lawrence describes a vast and

silent New Mexican landscape:

Down on ny hearth-rug of desert, sage of the mesa, An ash-grey pelt Of wolf all hairy and level, a wolf's wild pelt.

Seen from a distance, the patch of sage appears no larger than a wolf

pelt. As the speaker trots his pony down the mountainside and across

the floor of the valley, he describes the landscape in a series of

animal similes. The sage is like a wolf pelt. Fran a distance the

cedar and pinon pine are like otter's whiskers until the rider passes beneath them, and then they remind him of the "hairy belly of a great black bear." From a distance the aspen among the pine reminds the

speaker of a brindled tigress, but as he passes underneath, the yellow

aspen leaves give him the impression of golden feathers—he is riding between the "great and glistening-feathered legs of the hawk of Horus."

Wolf, otter, bear, tigress, jaguar, puma, leopard, and the mythical Egyptian hawk of Horus, all these are present, but the speaker reassures the pony Make big eyes, little pony At all these skins of wild beasts; They won't hurt you. Fangs and claws and talons and beaks and hawk-eyes Are nerveless just now. So be easy. 122

The land is brooding, asleep, fangs, claws, talons, beaks, all.sheathed at least temporarily; the silence is an uneasy silence, waiting.

"Spirits Summoned Vfest" (p. 410) could have been written by no other poet. Listen to the opening stanzas:

England seems full of graves to me, Full of graves.

Women I loved and cherished, like my mother; Yet I had to tell them to die.

Women with the beautiful eyes of the old days, Belief in love, and sorrow of such belief. "Hush, ray love, then, hush. Hush, and die, my deari"

And from his place in the mountains of New Mexico, the speaker calls

Come back to me now. Now the divided yearning is over; Now you are husbandless indeed, no more husband to cherish like a child And wrestle with for the prize of perfect love. No more children to launch in a world you mistrust. Now you need know in part No longer, or carry the burden of a man on your heart. Or the burden of Man writ large. Now you are disemburdened of Man and a man Come back to me.

Come home to me, my love, my loves, my many loves. Come west to me.

For virgins are not exclusive of virgins As wives are of wives; And motherhood is jealous, But in virginity jealousy does not enter.

This is far more than an Oedipal yearning for the mother figure. It is an acknowledgement of and a lament for the loss of love in the world, that mystical attraction which unites man and woman in a per­ fection of spirit, often unacknowledged, generally mistrusted, never fully understood, never spent, always fresh and new—virginal. But 123 because this spirit of love which goes forth is mistrusted and mis­ understood, it is denied, it is told to die. Age, sex, relationship, marital status have nothing whatever to do with this spirit. It is virginal wherever it exists. The poet realizes "all that is lost," as he states in the introduction to this section, for "often the dead look back. . . Then the living soul comes up with them, and great is the pain of greeting."

For Lawrence, England was spiritually dead although there was a time when there were

Women of the older generation, who knew The full doom of loving and not being able to take back.

There was a time when women’s eyes "were gentle in olden belief in love." This spirit from the West would call to those he loved in

England now in their graves. But "great is the pain of greeting, and deadly the parting again. For oh, the dead are disconsolate, since even death can never make up for some mistakes." (p. 406).

The final poem of this section and of the volume is "The Ameri­ can Eagle" (p. 413), not a pretty poem, but a political polemic.

Apparently Lawrence was disenchanted with the "American way of life," for he discovered the American eagle was no longer an eagle but only the ghost of an eagle. The great eagle had been hatched by a dove of

Liberty; therefore, he had great difficulty in behaving as an eagle should behave. Moreover, he neither looked, sounded, nor acted like the great eagle. He was nothing more than a pelican or was it a goose that could do nothing but lay an "addled golden egg," a sad commentary on the materialistic society that had gripped the United States in the

1920’s. 124

Taken as a whole, Birds, Beasts and Flowers is a most remarkable

collection of poems. Highly philosophical in nature, the volume imposes

a heavy burden on the reader in that the reader, as in Lookl Ws Have

Come Through 1, must provide the pattern which links the poems into a

whole. Of course Lawrence places regular sign posts enroute with his

introductions to the various sections, but the reader must be well

acquainted with the pre-Socratic philosophy, with Greek and Roman mythology, as well as with the Bible, or many of the allusions will

be missed. Furthermore, the arrangement of the poems on a biological

time scale seems obvious once it has been pointed out as does the

organization of the poems within each of the nine subdivisons. But nowhere does Lawrence ask the reader to link these poems together as he had suggested the reader do for the Lookl volume. However, when the poems are taken together as a series of moments, they do make up a kind of Divine Comedy seen in reverse, for man is seen as going fran paradise into the inferno, an inferno of his own devising. Lawrence is still engrossed in his developing concept of being.

He communicates here for the first time an extension of this concept to other separate but equal realms occupied by other beings: snakes, bats, turtles. His examination of Nature delves back in time to the origin of Being; he sees a gradual decline from a Golden Age, a decline

brought about by an increasing materialism and mechanization on the part of man. But Lawrence believes in a creative evolution and takes

comfort from what he sees in Nature for even what appears as bare

iron in December can put forth blossoms in the spring. 125 But the final poems also reveal a poet who has not yet grasped all the secrets of Being he felt awaited him. The vision he had expected to discover somewhere in his travels around the world had not yet revealed itself. The ghosts are there, the whole land broods waiting, "the sun leaps like a thing unleashed in the sky," and the poet concludes in "The Red Wolf"

As for me . . . Since I trotted at the tail of the sun as far as ever the creature went west, And lost him here, I’m going to sit down on my tail right here And wait for him to come back with a new story, (p. 405)

The vision is not yet complete; the mystery of Being still eludes the seeker. CHAPTER V

MAN AND SOCIETY

The publication of Birds, Beasts and Flowers in 1923 provides a line of demarcation in Lawrence’s thinking. The "Ghosts" section of that book showed New Mexico and Mexico as a land now sleeping but still full of promise; a disappointment, too, for the land said, "not now, not yet." But the "Red Wolf" was stubborn; he had followed the sun this far and "lost him here;" he would wait for his return. Lawrence waited at the New Mexican ranch until October 24, 1924, then he left for Mexico

City. But still the land repeated "not now, not yet, ’’ and at the same time, perhaps symbolically, it broke his health and probably his spirit as well, for at Oaxaca Lawrence fell gravely ill of malaria, followed by flu, both of which severely aggravated his tuberculosis. As soon as

Lawrence was able to travel, he returned to New Mexico, thence to New

York, England, and the Continent. Lawrence never returned to America, and he never again recovered his health. Thereafter, Lawrence sought the winter sun in Italy, Capri, and Majorca, making trips to England, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and France, when the wanderlust moved him. He attempted to work out in a novel those myriad impressions suggested to him by his experiences in Mexico, the impact of myth on primal energy that is embodied in man; the net result was The Plumed Serpent, 1926. But actually Lawrence was reworking old materials, and he continued to do so between’the years 1923 and 1929. Even Lady

Chatterley’s Lover. 1928, had little to say that Lawrence had not said earlier, though perhaps less explicitly. 127 Lawrence’s years between 1923 and 1929 were marred by a press­

ing need to make a living despite a constant state of ill health, and by constant skirmishes with censors, critics, and a skeptical public.

Nevertheless, Lawrence showed a steadfast unwillingness to prostitute what he felt to be the truth of his art, although sometimes one has the feeling that Lawrence is peevishly spiting the censors and thereby unwittingly devaluating his own work. This peevish attitude manifests itself in some of the poetiy from this period, as we shall see.

As for the poetiy between 1923 and 1929, Lawrence found time to revise and rewrite a number of his early poems in preparation for an edition of Collected Poems which was published in 1928. Between times

Lawrence penned a "bunch of pensees. anglice pansies; a handful of thoughts," which, as he declared in an "Introduction to Pansies." written in January, 1929, came one by one as a thought; not a bare idea or an opinion or a didactic statement, but a true thought, which ccmes as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head. A thought, with Its own blood of emo­ tion and instinct running in it like the fire in a fire-opal . . . they do not pretend to be half-baked lyrics or melodies in American measure. They are thoughts which run through the modern mind and body, each having its own separate existence, yet each of them combining with all the others to make up a complete state of mind. (p. 417)

Pansies was readied for publication in 1929, followed by Nettles in 1930.

Lady Chatterley1s Lover had reached publication and notoriety in

1928. The censors, who were waiting for and pounced on the Pansies manuscript, apparently expected the worst. Lawrence says of this event: When Scotland Yard seized the MS. in the post, at the order of the Home Secretaiy, no doubt there was a rush of detectives, postmen, and Heme Office clerks and heads, to pick out the most lurid blos­ soms. They must have been very disappointed, (p. 423). 128 About a dozen pansies were plucked from the bunch, Lawrence recalls, a

"dozen amusing, not terribly- important bits of pansies." Perhaps more pansies would have been plucked if the censors had been more perceptive of meaning and less on the lookout for the "so-called ’obscene* words."

Lawrence takes up the problem of obscenity in his "Introduction to Pansies" as he has elsewhere99 in an attempt to clarify his position, a position which rests squarely on the proposition that what is natural is healthy whether the seat of the function is above or below the navel.

Whoever the God was that made us, He made us complete. He didn’t stop at the navel and leave the rest to the devil. It.is too childish. And the same with the word which is God. If the word is God—which in the sense of the human mind it is—then you can’t suddenly say that all the words which belong below the navel are obscene. The word arse is as much god as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut off your god at the waist. What is obvious is that the words in these cases have been dirtied by the mind, by unclean mental associations. The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive emotion. Well, then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job. (p. 418)

About a dozen pansies had a bit of humus clinging to their roots; Law­ rence sacrificed the dozen in favor of the bunch. Pansies was published without further trouble in 1929. In his "Foreword" to Pansies Lawrence again explains what his pansies are: merely the breath of the moment, and one eternal mcment easily contradicting the next eternal moment. Only don’t nail the pansy down. You won’t keep it any better if you do. (p. 424). He leaves the critic in a difficult position. He offers a handful of

99"pornography and Obscenity," phoenix, pp. 170-187. See also D. H. Lawrence: Sex. Literature and Censorship, edited by Harry T. Moore, (New York: The Viking Press, 1959)- 129 thoughts, poetry but not "half-baked lyrics or melodies in American measure," that when taken together "make up a complete state of mind;" but in the next breath he tells us "don't nail the pansy down."

Nevertheless, an analysis of these "pansies" reveals that they are arranged in bunches with a semblance of order, often with as many as four or five poems circling around a single topic. The over-all arrangement is considerably looser than that of Birds. Beasts and Flowers. Pansies is more organic, less structured, in that one thought seems to lead to another about a given subject until the idea is exhaus ted or until a thought leads off in a new direction and starts a whole new train of thoughts. Lawrence may have acquired the idea for this arrangement from Whitman who sometimes grouped poems around a single idea in order to achieve a point through repetition.^0 And as Whit­ man said, "Do X contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, so Lawrence suggests that sometimes one thought contradicts another;1 nevertheless, the "pansies" when taken in a bunch do make up a state of mind. But Lawrence gives us fewer signposts than he provided in

Birds. Beasts and Flowers with its subdivisions and their respective prose introductions. The only clue to the arrangement of the Pansies is given in the "Introduction." Here, as with Lookl Wfe Have Cane Through I, the reader must take the thought or the moment as it is given and relate it to succeeding and preceding thoughts and moments in order to understand the "state of mind" or the psychological drama taking place.

10®Miller, Jr., p. 78. 130 But the poems do more than reveal a state of mind; they reveal

Lawrence’s essential theme, man's relationship to the universe once

again, even though in these poems the primary focus is on man’s rela­

tionship to man. We read his attitudes concerning love, politics,

class, and we discover little that he had not said earlier. These poems, then, tend primarily to clarify and to reenforce Lawrence’s earlier conceptions and pronouncements. But whereas Birds. Beasts and Flowers presented an extrinsic study of Being, Pansies and Last

Poems are an intrinsic study of Being. Here Lawrence looks deeply within and records what he sees. The thoughts, then, arise as much from the body as from the mind, because thoughts come colored each with its own emotion. Therefore, Lawrence insisted on the differ­ entiation between his "thoughts" and traditional poetry, the American lyric for example. If we are reading merely for idea, we have heard these ideas from Lawrence before, but never stated quite like this. The love

"thoughts" are more sensuous, the political "thoughts" more dogmatic, more polemical, the satire more scathing; the range of emotion is greater than we have encountered heretofore. The thought is colored by the feeling that accompanies it. Much of the wonder is gone except when Lawrence is yearning again for what he had once believed possible for man if man only would reach out for it. The vision of 1923 faded even while Lawrence was still in Mexico. What confronted

Lawrence for the rest of his days in Europe was a society increasingly more materialistic and mechanistic, the veiy antithesis of the vision he had glimpsed. He saw man allowing himself to be subjected to the 131 machine. He saw man being sapped of his manhood. He saw man respond­ ing automatically, mechanistically, according to pattern, with all the spontaneity gone, all the .joiede vivre gone, and only a kind of death- in-life remaining. Prufrock and the hollow men were realities in

Lawrence’s world as well as in T. S. Eliot's, and Lawrence was as distressed by these spectres as was Eliot. Harassed by misunderstand­ ing to the point of hostility and plagued by a pair of very weak lungs,

Lawrence alternated between the soft dreams of his vision described in the beautiful language of love and myth contrasted with the harsh real­ ity of a hostile world which he described in scathing, satirical and snide epithets.

The first series of pansies concerns love. Either the censors were terribly obtuse or else they were more perceptive than we gener­ ally give them credit for being; in any case "Our Day is Over," "Hard in the Dusk," "Twilight," "Cups," "Bowls," "You," and "After Dark," (pp. 425-428), all of these poems are warmly sensual if not downright erotic as exemplified by the first poem in the volume:

Our Day is Over

Our day is over, night comes up Shadows steal out of the earth. Shadows, shadows Wash over our knees and splash between our thighs, our day is done; We wade, we wade, we stagger, darkness rushes between our stones, We shall drown.

Our day is over night comes up. Lovely images of the night interfuse the human body with sensual 132 suggestion in this "thought" which is a poem and in the other poems of the group. We hear "in the dusk/ voices, gurgling like water," while "darkness . . . splashes warm between the buttocks," and we are told to "catch flesh like the night in one’s arms." Perhaps the cen­ sors were simply diverted by the four elephant poems—"Elephants in the Circus," "Elephants Plodding," "On the Drum," and "Two Performing

Elephants"—which intersperse the first handful of pansies. The ele­ phants are a reminder of past "ages of time," "hoary, far-gone ages," and one wonders how they happen into the middle of the love poems.

But Lawrence provides the clue: the last line of "Hark in the Dusk!" contains the word "belly" which apparently led Lawrence to remember elephant bellies he had once seen in a circus, and out comes "Ele­ phants in the Circus," its elephants showing "vast bellies to the children," and several other elephant-centered poems before Lawrence turns back again to the sensual love poems. This loose association of ideas provides the underlying structure of Pansies. but more often than not the connection between one subject and another is quite obvious even to the casual reader once he recognizes the general structure of the volume. Vfe have heard the elephant message before.

And although the love poems are more frank than any we have had . and at the same time more subtle, their message only reiterates what Lawrence has said many times in the past: love between man and woman is good. When lawrence speaks of love, he means more than the sexual aspect alone; he means total involvement—sensual and spiritual— between two whole people, but an involvement of Being without mental interference. 133 Thus in the next poem, "To Let Go or to Hold on--?" (p. 428), Lawrence can ask:

Shall we let go, and allow the soul to find its level or else, or else shall a man brace himself up and lift his face and set his breast and go forth to change the world?

The question asked concerns the course of evolution: can one, and if one can, should one direct the course of evolution? Lawrence believed in evolution, but not an evolution directed by men. Lawrence thought man was marked for evolution but that the evolution could only take place if man allowed it to occur. Man could help the process along by not interfering but by letting himself Be, thereby letting evolu­ tion take its natural course. These ideas of Lawrence’s are never clearly worked out although he attempts to work them out in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent. and he toys with the idea of evolution in some of his poems such as the one quoted above and in the poem which follows it. In "Destiny" (p. 430) the speaker wonders if mankind is marked for obliteration; if so, he says, I would be willing to give way, like the pterodactyl, and accept obliteration but if mankind is not marked for obliteration, if . . . mankind must go on being mankind, then I am willing to fight, I will roll my sleeves up and start in. Apparently Lawrence thinks man is not marked for obliteration; there­ fore, he begins his fight in "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is—" (p. 431) by attacking his fellowman who appears 134 Presentable eminently presentable Oh, but wait! Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man’s need, let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face him with a new demand on his understanding and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.

Lawrence was absolutely disgusted with the phoneyness and the pretense which he felt characterized the bourgeois, men who made themselves eminently presentable for a drawing room, but who collapsed under any of life's real demands. The very titles of the poems which follow indicate the level of Lawrence's attack: "Worm Either Way," "Natural

Complexion," "The Oxford Voice," "True Democracy," and "To be Superior."

A few lines from these poems will sufficiently demonstrate the level of the attack: from "Worm Either Way" (p. 431):

the turned worm boasts: I copulate! the unturned says: You look it. You're a d b____b____ p____ bb_____, says the worm that's turned. Quite! says the other. Cuckoo! from "Natural Complexion" (p. 433): Only, if you insist on pulling on those chamois gloves I swear I'll pull off ny knickers, right in the Rue de la Paix. frcm "The Oxford Voice" (p. 433): And oh, so seductively superior, so seductively self-effacingly deprecatingly superior.— from "True Democracy" (p. 434):

I wish I was a gentleman as full of wet as a watering-can to pee in the eye of a police-man— 135 We should keep in mind that the pansy is a "thought” rather than a

lyric and that Lawrence is determined to give us the whole range of

thoughts. It is difficult to take him seriously. Granted his criti­

cism is well-warranted, nevertheless, the very people whom he chooses

to castigate remain unmoved by an attack at this level; rather he

shares the thought with those who are sympathetic and who are equally provoked by phoneyness and pretense. Later on Lawrence will label such poems "Nettles," a more appropriate heading than Tansies." How­ ever these "thoughts" do reveal Lawrence's state of mind at this particular moment.

The poems which immediately follow turn to myth and suddenly sound like another voice altogether. The first of the mythical poems is entitled "Swan" (p. 435), but the swan is brought into the twentieth century in all his glory:

Swan

Far-off at the core of space at the quick of time beats and goes still the great swan upon the waters of all endings the swan within vast chaos, within the electron.

For us no longer he swims calmly nor clacks across the forces furrowing a great gay trail of happy energy, nor is he nesting passive upon the atoms, nor flying north desolative icewards to the sleep of ice, nor feeding in the marshes, nor honking horn-like into the twilight.— 136

But he stoops, now in the dark upon us; he is treading our women and we men are put out as the vast white bird furrows our featherless women with unknown shocks and stamps his black marsh-feet on their white and marshy flesh.

Here is a poem of the quality of the best poem in Birds, Beasts and

FLowers. It sings anew of the civilization that is coming, of the evolution that is taking place, and does so in mythological terms.

It is beautifully constructed with its staccato opening which forces the reader to back off in time and space and to hear the elemental beat of the swan as he gathers his energy and readies himself. The juxtaposition of space and "vast chaos," indicating infinity, with the "electron," the last word in the stanza, brings the myth into the twentieth century. The space and vast chaos are placed in the electron. At the core of space we find the quick of time, that which is vital, alive, and beats with energy, and is beginning to stir.

In the second stanza, this vital energy stirs restlessly, no longer "happy energy." By a series of negations Lawrence builds to a climax. The swan is stirring but not for the usual natural reasons: nesting, feeding, migration; nor is this a move toward self-destruction suggested by the ice image or the "sleep of ice." We know now this is no ordinary swan, this "great swan upon the waters of all endings" who is gathering itself together restlessly.

In the third stanza the nature of the swan is revealed; he is a great god come to vivify the race of man. The poem is rich with 137 meaningful references in the Lawrencean lexicon: "quick,” meaning

"vital," for example; and the "sleep of ice" as opposed to the swan’s ccming in the dark, for the swan is not flying "icewards" toward destruction, but rather he is creative as he "stoops, now/ in the dark" and "furrows our featherless women." Not only does the allit­ eration of "furrows" and "featherless" please, but both words are happy choices: "furrows" in the sense of plowing and making fallow; and "featherless” because it is appropriate to the occasion but also adds, a touch of humor for one must think of that awful description of man as "featherless biped" now recreated, revivified by a god, the women transformed from "marshy flesh" into Helens. But this poem is also enhanced by its companion pieces: "Leda," "Give Us Gods," "Won't It Be Strange—?" and "Spiral Flame."

In "Leda" (p. 436) the swan comes "not with kisses/ not with caresses" but in a great and violent rush; and the new race will be a race of gods, born of the swan in "Give Us Gods" (p. 436), born of the first god back at the beginning of creation, out of

Mists where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come untied; mists of mistiness complicated into knots and clots that barge about and bump on one another and explode into more mist, or don’t mist of energy most scientific— But give us gods! Look then where the father of all things swims in a mist of atoms electrons and energies, quantums and relativities mists, wreathing mists, like a wild swan, or a goose, whose honk goes through ny bladder. 138 Do you think, scientific man, you’ll be father of your own babies? Don’t imagine it. There'll be babies bom that are cygnets, 0 my soul! young wild swans 1 And babies of women will come out young wild geese, 0 my heart! the geese that saved Rone, and will lose London.

One can well imagine the nature of the discussion that took place when

Aldous Huxley came to call: Huxley telling Lawrence that babies will

soon be manufactured in test tubes, and Lawrence insisting that the

only thing that will save mankind will be the swan, the argument rac­

ing up and down and back and forth frcm Democritus to Einstein, and from electrons to cygnets.^0^

Lawrence asks "Won't it be strange," in a poem by that title

(p. 438), "when the nurse brings the new-born infant/ to the proud father, and shows its little, webbed greenish feet;" the father will ask, "Woman where got you this little beast?—" protesting "This is

none of mine!" Then, asks the speaker, will there cane the "whistle

of wings in the air . . . the singing of swans" that

break the drums of his ears and leave him forever listening for the answer?

This group of pansies closes with "Spiral Flame" (p. 439). a poem to confirm those critics who reduce Lawrence's message to nothing more than phallic worship. However, we ought not to take this poem as seriously as the earlier poems in this group for the tone of the poem is not consistent as it has been in the preceding mythical poems. It starts off seriously enough, but there is a distinct dropping off iron

l°^Huxley called on Lawrence from time to time. His Brave New World (New York: Doubleday) was published in 1932. 139 high seriousness to

The All-wise has tired us of wisdom The weeping mother of god, inconsolable over her son makes us prefer to be womanless, rather than be wept over. And that poor late makeshift, Aphrodite emerging in a bathing-suit from our modern sea-side foam has successfully killed all desire in us whatsoever.

Lawrence has a sharp tongue and a lively wit as his Aphrodite image shows. Since the modern male has gone so dead it will take a full- fledged "vivifier ... a swan-like flame that curls round the centre of space" to revive them

so we roar up like bonfires of vitality and fuse in a broad hard flame of many men in a oneness.

There follows the apostrophe to the "pillars of flame" calling on them to

. . . burn the house down, all the fittings and elaborate furnishings and all the people that go with the fittings and the furnishings, the upholstered dead that sit in deep arm-chairs.

The change of tone which takes place in "Spiral Flame" by the intro­ duction of such images as "Aphrodite emerging in a bathing-suit" and "upholstered dead" in "deep arm chairs" leads into the next group of poems which rail at a materialistic civilization. We have been pre­ pared for this change of mood by the transitional "Spiral Flame."

Lawrence equates materialism with mechanism, and mechanism with death. In poem after poem he rails against men who have been absorbed by the machine, men who have renounced their manhood, monkey-men:

For God’s sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.

Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.— (p. 450) 140 This poem is more "thought," more like a Pascal "pensee" than like a

poem as we usually think of a poem. It certainly is a far cry from

"Swan." Again the would-be satirist is at work. Lawrence had no

patience with the spectators of iife; he called this group of people the living dead.

One can well imagine what Lawrence would think of the television

addict for he tells us in "Let the Dead Bury their Dead—" (p. 440)

The dead give ships and engines, cinema, radio and gramophone, they send aeroplanes across the sky, and they say: Now, behold, you are lining the great life! "While you listen in, while you watch the film, while you drive the car, While you read about the air-ship crossing the wild Atlantic behold, you are living the great life, the stupendous life!— but then he rants excessively, repugnantly, in this poem as well as in too many other poems which reiterate the same message:

Don’t ever be kind to the smiling, tooth-mouthed dead don’t ever be kind to the dead it is pandering to corpses, the repulsive, living fat dead.

In the poem "When I went to the Film—" (443) he tells of an audience that responded "with all the emotions . . . with rising passions they none of them for a moment felt;" the knowledge of the kissing reflected on the screen was all mental knowledge, false knowledge, and the audi­ ence responded with sighs, sobs, and moans "they none of them felt." But in the poem "When I Went to the Circus" (p. 444) we discover an audience of "uneasy people "..frightened by "the bare earth . . . and the smell of horses and other beasts." The audience seemed to resent the mystery that lies in beasts and they become "depressed" as they watch the tight rope walker and the man an the flying trapeze for l4l

They know they have no bodies that could play among the elements, They have only their personalities, that are best seen flat, on the film, flat personalities in two dimensions, imponderable and touchless.

The children, however, from time to time recognize what they have almost lost, for the

. . . strange, almost frightened shout of delight that comes now and then from the children shows that the children vaguely know how cheated they are in their birthright in the bright wild circus flesh.

People have become spectators of life, learning by watching other people who are acting out their parts in a two-dimensional, black and white world. Lawrence’s immense sensitivity to life’s possibilities reveals itself in his resentment toward those people who respond only to a two-dimensional world because they are frightened of experiencing directly for themselves. Lawrence reveals a ready alternative, though.

He says in the poem "We Are Transmitters—" (p. 449) the secret of life is in giving although the giving of life is not easy:

It doesn’t mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living dead eat you up. It means kindling the life-quality where it was not, in making things with your hands, in the placing of yourself in your work. This message is important enough to be reiterated over and over, in "Things Men Have Made—" (contrasted with "Things Made by Iron—" and "New Houses, New Clothes—"), in "Whatever Man Makes—," in "All That We Have is Life—," and in "Work." One sees the influence of both Carlyle and Ruskin in these ideas. The message of "Work" was partly explored in an earlier poem in this section called "A Living" (p. 443) which tells plainly how to Be: 142 A Living A man should never earn his living, if he earns his life he'll be lovely. A bird picks up its seeds or little snails between heedless earth and heaven in heedlessness. But the plucky little sport, it gives to life song, and chirruping, gay feathers, fluff-shadowed warmth and all the unspeakable charm of birds hopping and fluttering and being birds. —And we, we get it all from them for nothing.

Now that is a pleasant thought. The central message of "Work" (p. 450) is that man, like the bird, may earn his life in his work, for

When a man goes out into his work he is alive like a tree in spring he is living, not merely working.

As the Hindus weave "thin wool into long, long lengths" and are "like slender trees putting forth leaves," so man when he turns out

. . . houses, ships, shoes, wagons or cups or loaves men might put them forth as a snail its shell, as a bird that leans its breast against its nest, to make it round as the turnip models his round root, as the bush makes flowers and gooseberries, putting them forth, not manufacturing them and thus man can smash the machine and become man once more; "let the dead bury their dead," but let the living have a chance to live again, naturally, spontaneously in all that they do. The analogues are beau­ tifully chosen; the message of these poems is crystal clear; and the form of the poem is appropriate for the content, for like the "bird that leans/ its breast against its nest, to make it round," so too the poem is put forth in natural rhythms, natural sounds, not manufactured to particular specifications. Lawrence is imitating no one; he is 143 telling forth his vision, in his own voice, in the most direct, straight forward, uncomplicated way possible for him, his only guide his own direct and living experience shaped by a penetrating intelligence. Such poetry takes a tremendous amount of discipline and care, for as Rexroth comments: "Any falsity, any pose, any corruption, any ineptitude, any vulgarity, shows up immediately."^02 Lawrence had been experimenting with this method of writing poems as early as 1913 when he wrote in a letter to Edward Marsh: I think, don’t you know, that my rhythms fit my mood pretty well, in the verse. And if the mood is out of joint, the rhythm often is. I have always tried to get an emotion out in its own course, without altering it. It needs the finest instinct imaginable . . .^-°3

The Pansies attest to Lawrence’s fine instinct for capturing and com­ municating a mood along with an idea, thus Lawrence puts forth the pansy "as the bush makes flowers . . . putting them forth, not manu­ facturing them."

In the next group of poems Lawrence links man with the sea and the moon. He was fascinated by the tidal control the moon exerts on the sea; he linked the sea with the primal being of man; and conse­ quently, he recognized and knew the moon’s force on man’s being. Six poems comprise the sea group: "Moon Memory," "There is Rain in Me—,"

"Desire Goes Down into the Sea—," "The Sea, The Sea—," "November by the Sea—," and "Old Song." The first of these poems, "Moon Memory," provides the transition from those poems which rail against a

■¡■°2Rexroth, p. 15.

3~O3Letters, p. 221. 144 materialistic civilization to the mystic poms suggesting the idea

that man is in a primal sense linked with the sea.

In "Moon Memory" (p. 453) when "the moon falls on a man’s

blood . . . flicking at his ribs"

. . . and ebbs hitting, washing inwardly, silverily against his ribs on his soul that is dark ocean within him

then "the dirty day-world . . . the trashy, motor-driven transit of

dirty day" is wiped out of existence. Having expunged the "dirty day-

world" with moonlight, Lawrence can listen to the sea within. The

following quotations come from other poems in the sea-group: There is rain in me running down, running down, trickling away from memory, (p, 454)

All day long I feel the tide rocking, rocking though it strikes no shore in me. (p. 454)

The sun and moon exert their pull on the sea while the sea exerts its

force in return; and man responds to all of these forces, the sun, the moon, and the sea:

The sea dissolves so much and the moon makes away with so much more than we know— (p. 454)

A few gold rays thickening down to red as the sun of my soul is setting setting fierce and undaunted, wintry but setting, setting behind the sounding sea between my ribs (p. 455) All these forces of which man has blood knowledge rather than intel-. lectual knowledge operate mysteriously but recognizably on and within man. The body responds in a way the mind cannot follow. Lawrence

acknowledges these intuitions of the body poetically by cosmological 145 metaphors. Man participates in the universe as does the sun, the moon, and the sea, with all of these bodies interacting on one another.3'0^

The sun pulls moisture from the sea and frcm man; the moon controls the tides of the sea and exerts its pull on man. Who can remain totally unmoved by a full moon? The mind cannot grasp all that the body knows Lawrence insists.

The cosmological forces at work within man must be allowed their natural action whether man can make rational such forces, Lawrence believed. Therefore, he writes a whole series of poems concerning man’s sexual activity in which he urges men to be men, to respond to their natural forces. He insists that women need and want male assertion in such poems as "Good Husbands Make Unhappy Wives—," "Fight! 0 My Young

Men—," "Women Want Fighters for Their Lovers." And he shows men how to be men in such poems as "It’s Either You Fight Or You Die—,"

"Don’ts," "The Risen Lord," "The Secret Waters," and "Beware, 0 My

Dear Young Men—." Then he defends the ideas he has set forth in the above poems by a concluding series of poems which explain the probity of the moral code he is advocating: these last poems in the series are

lo4Tindall traces Lawrence’s interest in theosophy to a Blavatsky disciple, James M. Pryse, who instructed A.E. in some of its teachings. A more direct source may have been MTs. Annie (Wood) Besant (1847-1933) who gave 15 lectures over a three month period in the late Spring of 1909 in the south of London, at the time Lawrence was teaching at Croydon. Although Lawrence never acknowledges a source, the cosmology of his Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia reveals a striking similarity to that of Annie Besant’s in her A. Study in Consciousness. first printed in 1904 and reprinted 1907, 1912, and 1918, (and reprinted in Adyar, Madras, India; The Theosophical Publishing House, 1954). I am particularly struck by the similarity in diction. Lawrence is much closer to Besant than to Blavatsky in the diction of Psychoanalysis and Fantasia. Of course, Lawrence tended always to modify poetically what he has theorized in prose. 146 entitled "Obscenity," "Sex Isn't Sin—"The Elephant is Slow to Mate—," and "Sex and Trust."

Lawrence advises the young men that good husbands make unhappy wives just as often as bad husbands do. He adds Women don’t want wishful mushy, pathetic young men struggling in doubtful embraces then trying again, (p. 457)

What women want is male assertion; consequently, he urges the young men to rise up and fight, to respond according to the call of the flesh, to trust the body. The sexual act itself is neither "dirty" nor sinful, but it can be made obscene when "the dirty mind pokes in." Young men have the choice between "new life" for themselves and their women,

"complemental, ’’ or they can bend their noses toward the "sewer scent

. . . bent on smelling it all" (p. 462).

This group of poems reveals another mood. Highly didactic, the tone sometimes bordering on the sarcastic, the poems are satiric in the

Juvenalian sense in that they are bitter, biting, and angry, as in "Sex

Isn’t Sin—" (p. 463): Sex isn't sin, ah no! sex isn’t sin, nor is it dirty, not until the dirty mind pokes in. We shall do as we like, sin is obsolete, the young assert. Sin is obsolete, sin is obsolete, but not so dirt. And sex, alas, gets dirtier and dirtier, worked from the mind. Sex gets dirtier and dirtier, the more it is fooled with, we find. Sex isn’t sin, but dirty sex is worse, so there you are! But by illustrating with an analogue from animal life, Lawrence warns the young men that he is not talking about sexual promiscuity nor a 147 simple act of lust. Lawrence is setting forth as clearly as possible

the difference between lust and love. He is talking about personal

commitment which is not a state of affairs which one arrives at over­

night. He illustrates his point with the elephant analogue. The ele­

phants of "The Elephant is Slow to Mate" (p. 465) "show no haste/ they wait/ for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts/ slowly, slowly to

rouse." In the concluding poem of the series, he makes clear the dif­

ference between the sexual life he is advocating contrasted with lust.

Sex and Trust

If you want to have sex, you’ve got to trust at the core of your heart, the other creature. The other creature, the other creature not merely the personal upstart; but the creature there, that has come to meet you trust it you must, you must or the experience amounts to nothing, mere evacuation-lust.

The next question of course would be, "How do you know ahead of time whether the experience will be the proper kind of experience?" Perhaps the next series of poems provide part of the answer.

Seven little poems, each of them four to six lines in length, follow the long section concerning man’s proper sexual life. These next poems are a series of little nature thoughts, but more than that they could be construed as exempla. Any of the poems will serve:

Little Fish

The tiny fish enjoy themselves in the sea. Quick little splinters of life their little lives are fun to them in the sea. 148

Perhaps the message of "Sea-Vfeed" will make Lawrence’s position clearer:

Sea-weed sways and sways and swirls as if swaying were its form of stillness; and if it flushes against fierce rock it slips over it as shadows do, without hurting itself.

Everything in nature experiences its own medium, its own realm, and

responds according to its own nature, unconcerned about itself. Only man alone has the capacity for self-concern, which according to Lawrence

is man’s greatest pitfall. Man must learn to let himself Be as the fish knows how to Be, as the sea-weed lets itself Be. Note the lesson in

another of the poems which comprise this series of nature studies:

Self-Pity

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. As stated earlier in the chapter and illustrated by the clusters of poems about a single topic, the ebb and flow movement of mood between positive and negative poles of existence characterizes the general struc ture of Pansies. At this point in the volume we move again frcm a posi­ tive statement back toward the negative. Lawrence presents another bunch of pansies which could be labeled "Sex in the Head" or given the title of one of the poems in the group "Noli Me Tangere—," touch me not. What lawrence is exploring in this group of poems is the word "touch," what it is and what it is not. He insists that the physical touch must not be confused with the mental, and further if two people are intimate mentally, they must not proceed to physical intimacy.

During this period Lawrence is unbearably aware of the cerebral inti­ macy, the probing of the body by the mind. 149 He pleads in the poem "Chastity":

0 leave me clean fran mental fingering from the cold copulation of the will, fran all the white, self-conscious lechery the modern mind calls lovei

When a proper touch occurs, it will cane of its awn accord. It can­

not be wished into existence; it comes unawares; and it cones slowly.

Because touch canes ever so slowly as we saw in the poem "Elephants are Slow to Mate," Lawrence can rule out casual desire and lust. He

explains his position more fully in the following poem:

Touch Comes— Touch comes when the white mind sleeps and only then. Touch comes slowly, if ever; it seeps slowly up in the blood of men and women. Soft slow sympathy of the blood in me, of the blood in thee rises and flushes insidiously over the conscious personality of each of us, and covers us with a soft one warmth, and a generous kindled togetherness, so we go into each other as tides flow under a moon they do not know.

Personalities exist apart; and personal intimacy has no heart. Touch is of the blood uncontaminated, the unmental flood. When again in us the soft blood softly flows together towards touch, then this delirious day of the mental welter and blether will be passing away, we shall cease to fuss. This poem is not one of Lawrence’s finest by any means, partly because it is too obviously didactic, and partly because of the problem with diction—that problem the result of a renewed attempt at rhyme: 150

"together-blether," and "us, delirious, fuss." But in spite of the

awkward rhyme scheme of the last stanza, this poem is the best of the

twelve that make up this group of poems beginning with "Ity Enemy" and

finishing with "Ego Bound Woman" all of them dealing with "sex in the head.,,3-°3 Together they elucidate what Lawrence means by "sex in the

head" in contrast with proper sensuality. He says in "Leave Sex Alone—"

Leave sex alone, leave sex alone, let it die right away let it die right away, till it rises of itself again

For while we have sex in the mind, we truly have nene in the body.

Sex is a state of grace and you'll have to wait.

At present, sex is the mind's preoccupation, and in the body we can only mentally fornicate, (p. 471) but this message is properly classified as a "pansy," a "thought" rather than a poem even though it is arranged in verses and stanzas. The

"thought" or idea which underlies this group of poems is of vital con­ cern to Lawrence. Elsewhere Lawrence has taken Freud to task3-0^ for having put sex in the head. Perhaps Lawrence makes most explicit the thought he is attempting to express in "Climb Down, 0 Lordly Mind—" portions of which are quoted below:

A man is many things, he is not only a mind. But in his consciousness, he is tiro-fold at least; he is cerebral, intellectual, mental, spiritual, but also he is instinctive, intuitive, and in touch. • • • • •••••• • ••• Know thyself, and that thou art mortal, and therefore, that thou art forever unknowable; the mind can never reach thee.

See "Love, sex, Men, and Women," Phoenix, pp. 151-211. ^^psychoanalysis, pp. 11-12. 151 The blood knows in darkness, and forever dark, in touch, by intuition, instinctively. The blood also knows religiously, and of this, the mind is incapable. The mind is non-religious.

Man is an alternating consciousness. Only that exists which exists in my own consciousness. Cogito, ergo sum. Only that exists which exists dynamically and unmentalised, in my blood. Non cogito, ergo sum. I am, I do not think I am. (pp, 473-474).

This poem, "Climb Down, 0 Lordly Mind—," is central to an understand­ ing of Lawrence’s theory of Being as summarized in the last line:

"lam, I do not think I am." Being precedes thinking, thus the pri­ mary touch is in the body. The primary knowing is in the experiencing itself. I AM. Lawrence says, I AM even before I think the idea that

I am. Reality is my Being experiencing-in-the-moment-of-experience.

At last Lawrence can express what he had tried to say twenty years earlier in "The Wild Common." In his "Introduction" to the

Complete Poems, Lawrence wrote: poems like "The Wild Common" . . . were struggling to say something which it takes a man twenty years to be able to say. ... A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon’s mouth sometimes . . . (p. 28) But revised in 1928, "The Wild Common" now says articulately what a youth of nineteen could only mumble in 1909: I know I am alive not because I think so but because I feel I am, ny senses tell me I £M: I on the bank all substance, my shadow all shadow . . .

But how splendid it is to be substance, here! My shadow is neither here nor there; but I, I am royally here! I am here! I am here! screams the peewit; the may-blobs burst out in a laugh as they hear! Here! flick the rabbits. Here! pants the gorse. Here! says the insects far and near. 152 Over my skin in the sunshine, the warm, clinging air Flushed with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad. You are here! You are here! Vie have found you! Everywhere Vie sought you substantial, you touchstone of caresses, you naked lad!

Oh but the water loves me and folds me, Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me, murmurs: Oh marvellous stuff! No longer shadow!—and it holds me Close, and it rolls me, enfolds me, touches me, as if never it could touch me enough.

Sun, but in substance, yellow water-blobs! Wings and feathers on the crying, mysterious ages, peewits wheeling! All that is right, all that is good, all that is God takes substance! a rabbit lobs In confirmation, I hear sevenfold lark-songs pealing, (pp. 33-34) Even the very title of the poem itself "The Wild Common" speaks the theme of Lawrence’s poetry, for he has been seeking all along what man has in caramon with his cosmos as well as what makes man man. He learns the paradox that is man: "Cogito, ergo sum" but also "Non cogito, ergo Mum/

I am, I do not think I am." (p. 474).

After this pronouncement the next group of pansies delves down to primal being. "Know Deeply, Know Thyself More Deeply—’’ urges man

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths, love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock molten, yet dense and permanent, (p. 477) In "Fidelity" (p. 476) Lawrence paints love as a flower that comes into blossom as a "swift motion" and fades like a comet, but by contrast, fidelity is a gem that has resulted frcm an action that takes place much deeper in the earth than the roots of flowers can penetrate and which lasts ever^so much longer. A flower blooms and dies in a summer, but fidelity takes many summers to come into being and as many genera­ tions to pass away. 153 There must be a gem of trust between two people, and it will have taken many summers in its generation to achieve the present form.

Such a gem can withstand the ageing process. The speaker urges the

woman to throw away the mirror and become "self-forgetful.'’ He says:

I do not want a woman whom age cannot wither. She is a made-up lie, a dyed immortelle of infinite staleness. (p. 478)

Again and again Lawrence urges people to be themselves, or perhaps it is better stated by saying Lawrence urges people to let themselves

Be. He tells us "the universe flows” in a poem with that title, and man ought to let himself flow

Only man tries not to flow, repeats himself over and over in mechanical monotony of conceit (p. 479) while all the time underneath (in a poem entitled "Underneath—"):

Below what we think we are we are something else, we are almost anything.

But we participate in a vital universe; therefore, just as

The earth leans its weight on the sun, and the sun on the sun of suns Back and forth goes the balance and the electric breath, just so The soul of man also leans in the unconscious inclination we call religion towards the sun of suns, and back and forth goes the breath of incipient energetic life. (p. 480) The poems of this section all explore the core of man’s existence which is likened to the core of the earth in its relation to the uni­ verse. "The "Primal Passions," the concluding poem of this group, builds on the ideas of the earlier poems. Despite its length the poem deserves to be quoted in full. 15^ The Primal Passions If you will go down into yourself, under your surface personality you will find you have a great desire to drink life direct from the source, not out of bottles and bottled personal vessels. What the old people call immediate contact with God. That strange essential communication of life not bottled in human bottles.

What even the wild witchcraft of the past was seeking before it degenerated.

Life from the source, unadulterated with the human taint.

Contact with the sun of suns that shines somewhere in the atom, somewhere pivots the curved space, and care not a straw for the put-up human figments.

Communion with the Godhead, they used to say in the past. But even that is human-tainted now, tainted with the ego and the personality. To feel a fine, fine breeze blowing through the navel and the knees and have a cool sense of truth, inhuman truth at last softly fluttering the senses, in the exquisite orgasm of coition with the godhead of energy that cannot tell lies. The cool, cool truth of pure vitality pouring into the veins from the direct contact with the source. Uncontaminated by even the beginnings of a lie.

The soul’s first passion is for sheer life entering in shocks of truth, unfouled by lies.

And the soul's next passion is to reflect and then turn round and embrace the extant body of life with the thrusting embrace of new justice, new justice between men and men, men and women, and earth and stars, and suns. The passion of justice being profound and subtle and changing in a flow as all passions change. But the passion of justice is a primal embrace between man and all his known universe.

And the passion of truth is the embrace between man and his god in the sheer coition of the life-flow, stark and unlying. 155 To know, in the Lawrencean sense of knowing, is an orgasm of intuition,

and this kind of knowledge is frightening because it is at worst irra­

tional, and at best a-rational, coming to man in an age that is super- rational, scientific, mechanistic, computerized. Still any intuition

implies a leap of faith. The knowledge Lawrence talks about makes itself known through the body. He says in the Fantasia when we know we are right, we know it first in the body, in a gut feeling, and only afterwards in the head. Even if we cannot rationalize the knowledge which we achieve in this intuitive manner, we will know we are right and act on the knowledge which was given. The point is, of course, that the knowledge has been given, it comes of its own accord, direct,

"unbottled," "unadulterated," "untainted," "uncontaminated," as unsought truth. The problem is to decide which course of action we should fol­ low when our body knowledge conflicts with our training, our mental knowledge. Lawrence unhesitatingly answers by telling us we can go wrong in our heads, but our bodies are never wrong. Lawrence assumes that man is an innately moral creature residing in a moral universe, but man can disturb the moral order through the wrong use of reason or intellect. The intellect should be used to fulfill the requirements signalled by the body, not vice versa. Man needs to bring the center of balance back deep into the body an^ out of the head. The line of thinking which connects this last series of poems with one another and the group which precedes it is interesting in .. itself. The previous section had dealt with "sex in the head," clos­ ing with several poems concerning the "ego-bound" who needs to get his roots into the raw earth again. This idea leads into the poem 156 entitled "Fidelity1’ which explores the difference between love and fidelity and concludes that fidelity is rooted far more deeply in the earth, a gem fused at the core of existence; by extension, if man delves deeply into himself, he will discover "fidelity" surpasses

"love," thus when he is confronted with a conflict of fidelity versus love, by delving deep inside himself, he will discover that the demands of fidelity will surpass the demands of love. Therefore, the next poems urge man to go deeply into himself, to experience the universal flow, the primal passions that surge at the soul and offer themselves up

"not bottled in human bottles" but as a "communion with the Godhead."

The bottle idea leads into the next poem entitled "Escape" which pro­ vides a transition from this section on primal being to probe anew problem, to discover what has gone wrong with man. "Escape" begins- with the line, "when we get out of the glass bottles of our own ego," that is, once we do escape our ego, then the "institutions will curl up like burnt paper." As soon as Lawrence starts thinking about the state of modern man, he gets irritated, and his thoughts become satir­ ical and didactic. He begins with "The Root of our Evil—money, of course. The titles sufficiently suggest the direction of this new line of thought: "The Ignoble.Procession," "No Joy- in Life," "Wild Things in Captivity,"

"Mournful Young Men," "There is No Way Out," "Money-Madness," "Kill Money," "Men are Not Bad," and finally "Nottingham’s New University," paid for "by good Sir Jesse Boot of Boot’s Cash Chemist’s," a univer­ sity where smart men would dispense doses of smart cash-chemistry in a language of common-sense! (p. 488) 157 The whimsey and rhyme of "Nottingham's New University" lead

Lawrence in a new direction, this time into a series of autobiograph­

ical pansies done in whimsical rhyme. "I Am in a Novel" probably

refers to HuxLey's Point Counter Point, a roman a clef in which Rampion is obviously supposed to be Lawrence, although Lawrence did

not appreciate the portrait:

Well damn ray eyes! I said to myself. Wall damn my little eyes! If this is what Archibald thinks I am he sure thinks a lot of lies. (p. 489)

"Ity Naughty Book" refers to the furor raised over the diction of Lady

Chatterley*s Lover. Lawrence, with tongue in cheek, makes apologies in this poem to all his "foes and friends"

for using words they privately keep for their own immortal ends. (p. 492)

He vows henceforth never again to use "more than the chaste short dash" of which he makes liberal use in this poem. The whimsical mood shifts to a more serious note. The next major series of poems, twelve in all, deals with the subject of peace and of peaceless people, and with Being. The series begins with "Glory" which explains what Lawrence means by "peace." Glory Glory is of the sun, too, and the sun of suns, and down the shafts of his splendid .pinions run tiny rivers of peace. Most of his time, the tiger pads and slouches in a burning peace. And the small hawk high up turns round on the slow pivot of peace Peace comes from behind the sun, with the peregrine falcon, and the owl. Yet all of these drink blood.— 158 "When man is in harmony with the universe, then peace is passed up and

down between the sun, the sun of suns, the moon, the earth, in a vital

exchange, each thing being its own thing, taking from and giving to

the system. Peace is exhibited by the hawk in the business of being

himself as he turns on the air currents, even as. he seeks out prey in an exchange of blood: the image is most vivid. By contrast, peaceless- ness is portrayed in "Woe" as man conscious of himself, unable to forget himself, therefore asserting himself at the wrong moments, breaking the natural chain of events, and clashing with others in self-assertion.

People are so concerned with self, analyzing, making mental how they feel, and this assertion of feeling Lawrence finds intolerable.

He states in "Cerebral Emotions,” "if you really feel something/ you don’t have to assert that you feel it." As for himself, he says-.

"At present I am a blank, and I admit it" (p. 501). He feels one ought to live harmoniously so that when one is old it is a time of peace.

He carries through this idea in several poems, first negatively as in

"Elderly Discontented Women," "Old People” and "The Grudge of the Old," and then positively in "Beautiful Old Age." He castigates the old for wanting to be young when they should simply want to be themselves: It ought to be lovely to be old to be full of the peace that comes of experience and winkled ripe fulfillment, (p. 503) Being oneself brings its own peace. People need to have the courage to discover the truth about themselves, to find out how they really feel and then to act on it, is the message of "Courage" (p. 504); then man could "distil the essential oil out of every experience," Thus man would reach his fulfillment and give something back to the universe, 159 for as Lawrence asserts in "When the Ripe Fruit Falls—" (p. 504)

When fulfilled people die the essential oil of their experience enters the veins of living space, and adds a glisten to the atom, to the body of immortal chaos.

For space is alive and it stirs like a swan whose feathers glisten silky with oil of distilled experience.

Again and again Lawrence links man with his cosmos as an elemental being and still his cosmology is that of the pre-Socratic philosophers, for in the poem entitled "Elemental" (p. 505) he says:

Since man is made up of the elements fire, and rain, and air, and live loam and none of these is lovable but elemental, man is lop-sided on the side of angels.

I wish men would get back their balance among the elements and be a bit more fiery, as incapable of telling lies as fire is.

What we need to do, he says in "Fire" (p. 505) is to pool our fire, a huge pillar of fire that will send off "millions of sparks of new atoms" and even though it "burns the house down," he implies that mankind will find a renewal; the old phoenix myth is suggested here.

This series of poems on peace culminates in a low point of vital­ ity on Lawrence's part, as if living itself had became almost too much effort. In "Man Reaches a Point—" "Grasshopper is a Burden—" "Basta!"

"Tragedy" and "After All the Tragedies are Over—" we watch Lawrence’s descent into a dark mood; he seems to be undergoing an experience of great emptiness: "I have passed from existence, I feel nothing ary- more./ I am a nonentity." Finally in "Nullus" the nadir is reached; 160 I know I am nothing. Life has gone away, below my low-water mark.

But I can do nothing about it except admit it and leave it to the moon. (pp. 509-510)

By his reference to the moon Lawrence clearly indicates that he expects the tide to change; this feeling of non-existence, too, will pass. He continues:

There are said to be creative pauses, pauses that are as good as death, empty and dead as death itself. And in these awful pauses the evolutionary change takes place. Perhaps it is so. The tragedy is over, it has ceased to be tragic, the last pause is upon us. Pause, brethren, pause! (510) Lawrence is projecting for mankind what he himself is presently experiencing. In this series of "thoughts" he has revealed a "state of mind" as premised by the introduction. His experience with nullity is intensely personal and may or may not be a universal experience; however, he projects this phenomenon to the state of man in the poem

"Dies Irae" (p. 510):

Even the old emotions are finished, we have worn them out. And desire is dead. And the end of all things is inside us.

Our epoch is over, a cycle of evolution is finished, our activity has lost its meaning, we are ghosts, we are seed; for our word is dead and we know not how to live wordless. and repeats the warning in 2Dies Ilia" (p, 5H) Day of wrath, 0 day of warning! Flame devours the world. The reconciliation follows, however, for Lawrence firmly 161 believed in a resurrection which he asserts in "Stop It—," "The Death

of Our Bra," "The New Word," "Sun in Me," and "Be Still!" The new word

is resurrection; even with the destruction going on all around there

remains a "tiny grain of something that no wave can wash away."

The one thing that must not give way is that spark of sanity.

The message of "At Last—" states that

If we lose our sanity we lose that which keeps us individual distinct from chaos.

In death, the atom takes us up and the suns. But if we lose our sanity nothing and nobody in the whole vast realm of space wants us, or can have anything to do with us.

Lawrence defines sanity as "the wholeness of the consciousness" but he feels that unfortunately his "society is only part conscious, like an idiot." We need to open ourselves out to the universe, to be aware of what is outside ourselves rather than to remain shut up within our­ selves. The universe itself is sane; the atom is sane; the lion, the bird, the flower are sane; man has the capacity for sanity: "Where sanity is/ there God is," says the poem "God" (p. 516). The message is the same in "The Sane Universe": One might talk of the sanity of the atcm, the sanity of space, the sanity of the electron, the sanity of water— For it is all alive and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves. The only oneness is the oneness of sanity. Those men in the universe who concentrate on only a part of the world, the puritan, the profligate, the wealthy, the poverty-stricken, would 162 tear the world in pieces. These men are the insane. Lawrence, how­

ever, is seeking the unity, the oneness which he terms sanity.

One short poem in the midst of the sanity poems acknowledges what is inexplicable about the universe:

The Third Thing

Water is H20, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and nobody knows what that is.

The atom locks up two energies but it is a third thing present which makes it an atom.

Lawrence asserts again and again that the source of life is from the sun, that whatever this "third thing" is it is of the sun. But most important, the universe is patterned even though man can never make known that pattern by reason alone; man learns the pattern fcy Being.

He comes to recognize the pattern through his senses. He experiences the warmth that comes with summer and the cold that is winter, but he cannot know hot and cold until he has felt the difference; he knows the difference first as sense experience. But man must be alive, fully alive, to know at first hand. There follows a long series of poems beginning with "Being Alive" and extending to "Peacock" which relates man to the cosmos, particularly to the sun. Lawrence makes clear in

"Space" what he means by "sun," (p. 525). Space, of course, is alive that’s why it moves about; and that’s what makes it eternally spacious and unstuffy.

And somewhere it has a wild heart that sends pulses even through me; and I call it the sun; and I feel aristocratic, noble, when I feel a pulse go through me from the wild heart of space, that I call the sun of suns. 163 Lawrence is a poet, but in addition he has always retained his keen interest in the sciences. He has been avidly following

the scientific discoveries and pronouncements of his era, Einstein’s

theory of relativity, for example, which Lawrence refers to in his

poem "Relativity" in a poetic fashion:

I like relativity and quantum theories because I don't understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind. (p. 524)

He feels less poetic about the theory of protective coloration which apparently he understands better than the relativity and quantum theories, for he takes it upon himself to dispute the theory of pro­ tective coloration in a poem entitled "Self-protection" (p. 523).

He asserts that the nightingale "is giving himself away in every sense of the word" when he sings at the top of his voice, and the tiger "is striped and golden for his own glory" otherwise he'd be grey-green and truly invisible. What Lawrence is telling us in poems like the two referred to above is that he is not ignorant of the scientific dis­ coveries that are taking place, but he does not want man to give himself entirely to the scientific outlook for that too is but a par­ tial view of existence. Truly the nightingale gives himself away when he sings, but man is afraid to give himself away as the poem "Cowards" reveals: In all creation, only man cowers and is afraid of life. Only man is terrified of his cum possible splendour and delight, (p. 529) 164 And in "Peacock" the same message is repeated:

Think how a peacock in a forest of high trees shimmers in a stream of blueness and long-tressed magnificence! And women even cut their shimmery hair! (p. 530)

Over and over Lawrence repeats the same message in Pansies in

a hundred different ways: man should let himself Be to experience his

own fullness of being; he need not fear his deep instincts: his instincts

are moral. What is immoral he makes clear in a very short poem:

Immorality

It is only immoral to be dead-alive, sun-extinct and busy putting out the sun in other people.

Finally, there remain 45 more little "pansies," nearly every

one of them in a negative vein about superior people, class superi­

ority, frustrated modern women. These last Pansies are quarrelsome, generally nasty, sometimes hysterical in tone. They reveal a poet with frayed and exhausted nerves, reiterating the same message he has

said better elsewhere. Of these remaining poems, "Ships in Bottles"

stands out for its central metaphor:

0 ship in a bottle with masts erect and spars all set and sails spread how you remind me of my London friends, 0 ships in bottles 1 Sail, little ships in your glass bottles safe from every contact, safe from all experience, safe, above all, from life. (p. 542) Prufrock has achieved a perfect insulation; he may be looked at but not 165 touched, "safe from all experience,/ safe, above all, from life."

The only poem in this final group that comes close to the con­ ception of some of the earlier Pansies is "Trust" in which Lawrence regains some of the perspective of his vision:

Trust

Gh we've got to trust one another again in some essentials. Not the narrow little bargaining trust that says: I’m for you if you’ll be for me.— But a bigger trust, a trust of the sun that does not bother about moth and rust, and we see it shining in one another.

Gh don’t you trust me, don’t burden me with your life and affairs; don’t thrust me into your cares. But I think you may trust the sun in me that glows with just as much glow as you see in me, and no more.

But if it warms your heart's quick core why then trust it, it forms one faithfulness more.

And be, oh be a sun to me, not a weary, insistent personality

but a sun that shines and goes dark, but shines 166 again and entwines with the sunshine in me

till we both of us are more glorious and more sunny.

The pansies when taken together do make up a state of mind; they reveal Lawrence’s state of Being, his fluctuations of mood, his ever changing focus of interest, his hopes, his dreams, his disgusts, his thoughts, each "with its own blood of emotion and instinct running in it like the fire in a fire-opal." At least Lawrence is honest. If the tone of a pansy sounds quarrelsome, that’s how Lawrence felt at the moment, and he will not lie about his feelings. Better to get the emotion out in its own course than to pretend he feels otherwise. Both

Strife and Love make their demands and must have their say. Why pretend it is otherwise.

Thus the Pansies are of autobiographical interest in that they reveal the fluctuations of Lawrence’s mood and interests, a psychologi­ cal drama taking place within a single individual and between that individual and the world of men. But of much greater interest to this study is that the pansies, all of them, help reveal Lawrence’s essen­ tial theme, how man shall Be in this world. Lawrence says that man must extricate himself from his own ego- centricity; he must move outside himself, as unconscious of his action as the hawk or the tiger, giving as freely of himself as the nightingale gives its song. In moving outside himself, man can link up with the cosmos in a series of interactions as natural as the moon’s pull on the tides or the sun’s attraction for the sunflower. The great disaster 167 for man is to become mechanical in his responses, to shut himself off

from the possibility for creativity by preconceived and therefore

automatic, mechanical responses to the demands of life. Particularly wrong is man’s inclination to respond with only a portion of the total self, a mental response without the accompanying physical response, a

spiritual response that denies the sensuality of man, or a sensual response acting independent of the spirit. Any of these acts indi­

cates a fragmented response, and every fragmented response is to be condemned. The only proper response is a unitary response rising up from the whole being, intuitive, and natural, never forced or hurried, creative, and implicitly moral since it is natural. However, Lawrence felt that mankind would unfortunately continue forward with its frag­ mented responses to life fostering on itself the seeds of its own destruction. Still in spite of mankind’s folly, Lawrence believed that out of destruction would come resurrection, that even if man as we know him were to pass out of existence as did the mastodon, in his place must come a higher being—or so Lawrence fervently wished though he could never be sure. Mankind could never remain static; of this

Lawrence was certain. He thought man could move in either direction, toward his own destruction or toward a creative evolution. The natural response to life, a unitary response, would lead toward the creative evolution; a fragmented response spelled man’s extinction. But no one would listen to the prophet, and Lawrence spewed his contempt for mankind in his last Pansies. referred to above, and in the Nettles

published in 1930, the year of Lawrence’s death. 168

By comparison with the poems that have gone before and the poems yet to come, not a single one of the twenty-seven Nettles is worth the effort of the poet, the publisher, the reader, or the critic.

Even the Lawrence apologist is hard put to discuss, much less justify, the rancor of the Nettles. One should probably only say lawrence was gravely ill, tired, spent, as well as vastly disappointed by the lack of understanding on all sides, and he took a perverse delight in con­ structing poems which he felt had a real sting to them. Unfortunately the very individuals who needed to be stung would never read the poems; therefore, the effort was wasted except as it perhaps offered some relief to Lawrence’s pent-up emotions. The Nettles are a harsher variety of the more negative pansies pointing out the death-in-life experienced by the masses as they

Trot, trot, trot, corpse-body, bo work. Chew, chew, chew, corpse-body, at the meal. Sit, sit, sit, corpse-body, in the car. Stare, stare, stare, corpse-body, at the film. Listen, listen, listen, corpse-body, to the wireless. Talk, talk, talk, corpse-body, newspaper talk. Sleep, sleep, sleep, corpse-body, factory-hand sleep. Die, die, die, corpse-body, doesn't matter! (p. 584)

The message is the same as that of "Let the Dead Bury their Dead—" from Pansies but more repugnant in diction. But the "Nettles" makes the harshest "Pansies" soft by comparison. Fortunately for everyone, although the Nettles were the last poems published during Lawrence's life, Lawrence left behind an ample testimony to his sanity, poems written in the last months before his death. One group of unpublished poems was discovered in a manuscript book inscribed on an inner cover "D. H. Lawrence, Bandol, Var, France. 169 23rd Nov. 1928" headed "Pensees” (p. 591). This manuscript provided the draft for some of the later Pansies, nearly all of the Nettles.

and those poems included in The Imagist Anthology, 1930. Since

Lawrence had the opportunity to select from among these pensees for

at least three separate publications and did not choose to publish

them and since they are generally of the same nature as the published

Pansies and Nettles discussed above, we need hardly spend more time with them than to acknowledge their existence. More important are the poems from a second manuscript, a "thickish, bound book," labelled

"Papeterie W. Bouvier, Geneve," on the outside, undated, containing

among other things thirty pages of poetry written on both sides of the page in Lawrence’s handwriting. These poems Richard Aldington

edited and published in 1932 as Last Poems. These last poems, despite their close chronological relationship to the Pansies, merit special

consideration for they represent the final phase of Lawrence’s poetic development. l~lO

CHAPTER VI

MAN AND DEATH

As death approached, Lawrence prepared his ship for the journey as his "Last Poems" (687-728) attest. He did not waver in the theory of being he had set forth in his earlier poetry; his roots go deep, back to the pre-Socratic Greeks, "before Plato," who "told the great lie of ideals," (p. 688) to the time when men did not know and did not need to know, to a time when it was enough simply to Be.

The organization of the "Last Poems" is strikingly similar to that of the Pansies—a group of poems written around a single topic, the thread of an idea linking one group of poems to the next, the total collection revealing a complete state of mind. The major difference in execution between the Pansies and the "Last Poems" is that the latter seem more "pondered and soignes" as Aldington pointed out (p. 592), but there is also a surer touch, an assurance: Lawrence no longer feels the necessity to persuade or harangue the reader; instead he reveals. Consequently, there is a greater serenity and a greater uniformity of tone. The most significant difference between the Pansies and the

"Last Poems," however, is that the Pansies primarily concern man in his relationship with other people, man in a society of men, whereas the "Last Poems" are conceived on a cosmological scale and investigate man’s relationship to God and to the universe as man faces death. Therefore, the quality of these last poems soars again to the level of Birds, feasts and Flowers as Lawrence eliminates the antagonizing, peevish tone characteristic of the Nettles and some of the Pansies and 171 moves back into the realm of myth where he is at his best. Each of

these poems merits the same close attention on the part of the reader

as did the poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Of course not all of

the "Last Poems" are of equal quality, but each contributes tq this

final cosmic vision and reveals Lawrence's state of mind as he prepared for death. But the poet disappears from his poems for the most part; the poems become more universal. For once Lawrence is discussing projected rather than lived experience.

Nevertheless, in the first of the "Last Poems" we find the poet, very likely at Bandol, probably in the fall of 1929, sitting on his balcony at dawn looking out to sea, watching the ships on the horizon.

Slipping out of time, the ships become the "ships of Cnossos," and the ships of Odysseus (pp. 687-688); but while the ships that cross the sea change, the sea itself and the distance remain unchanged. Thus what was once possible to Odysseus is still possible. The ships and the men in them will return; the same moon "who gives men glistening bodies" will illumine the "slim naked men from Cnossos . . . that will without fail come back again." As Lawrence had suggested in Birds,

Beasts and Flowers by his images of death and rebirth—even iron can put forth blossoms, and again in Pansies by his images of fire—which would spew forth a shower of vivifying sparks, here too Lawrence suggests a rebirth, a renaissance when men again would be men, for he believed that mankind too passed through cycles of death and rebirth. This same idea is reiterated in "The Greeks are Coming!" "The Argonauts, "Middle of the World," and in "For the Heroes are Dipped in Scarlet," in which 172 Lawrence castigates Plato for having told "the great lie of ideals"

(p. 688). Men were men before they discovered the realm of ideals.

The next group of poems takes up the problem of what consti­

tutes reality. In "Demiurge" (p. 689) Lawrence takes idealism to

task when he asserts:

Religion knows better than philosophy Religion knows that Jesus never was Jesus till he was born from a wanb, and ate soup and bread and grew up, and became, in the wonder of creation, Jesus, with a body and with needs, and a lovely spirit.

Again Lawrence insists on the two-fold aspect of man, and of Jesus:

body and spirit each making its demands. The poems which follow—

"The Work of Creation," "Red Geranium and Godly Mignonette," "Bodi­

less God," and "The Body of God,"—all of these poems assert the

existential being;

Imagine that any mind ever thought a red geranium! As if the redness of a red geranium could be anything but a sensual experience (p. 690)

and Eveiything that has beauty has a body, and is a body; everything that has being has being in the flesh: and dreams are only drawn from the bodies that are. (p. 691)

thus There is no god apart frcm poppies and the flying fish men singing songs, and women brushing their hair in the sun. (p. 691) Lawrence asserts that God "is the great urge . . . towards incarnation," that apparently creates out of its Being, not out of its Mind, for

"even an artist knows that his work was never in his mind,/ he could 173 never have thought it before it happened" (p. 691). At least Lawrence makes clear in "The Work of Creation" how his own creative processes worked:

A strange ache possessed him, and he entered the struggle, and out of the struggle with his material, in the spell of the urge his work took place, it came to pass, it stood up and saluted his mind. (p. 690)

Lawrence insists that the material arises frcm substance, not from the realm of the ideal or thought or mind. Even "the rainbow has a body"

(p. 692) although we can't touch it, not even with our minds. And thus it is with God, says the poem "Maximus" (p. 692). Our eyes cannot behold God, but the eye can behold man who is of God.

Lawrence's God is gradually undergoing definition. In Birds,

Beasts and Flowers Lawrence could say of the fish, "His God stands out­ side mv God." and assert the existence of "Other Gods/ Beyond my range

. . . gods beyond my God ..." (pp. 338-339), but these gods are with­ out clear definition, mythological at best. In the earlier Pansies God is still relatively undefined in such poems as "Spiral Flame," "Let the

Dead Bury Their Dead—," and in "When Wilt Thou Teach the People—?"

(pp. 439-443). For example, Lawrence could write:

There have been so many gods that now there are none. When the One God made a monopoly of it he wore us out, so now we are godless and unbelieving. However, in a much later pansy, Lawrence directs a poem to God: Where sanity is there God is. And the sane can still recognise sanity so they can still recognise God. l?b Here God is identified with "sanity." A companion poem defines sanity

as a vital universe, and asserts the sanity of space, water, and the electron, "the only oneness . . . the oneness of sanity" (p. 515).

Now in the "Last Poems" Lawrence writes a whole series of poems that define God. Lawrence says "nonsense" to Plato’s theory that "the idea of the form precedes the form substantial." Rather, "God is a great urge . . . but he knows nothing before-hand." Nor can anything exist without a body, not even God:

Unless God has a body, how can he have a voice and emotions, and desires, and strength, glory or honour? (p. 691) Therefore, since "God is the great urge that has not yet found a body/ but urges towards incarnation with the great creative urge," He mani­ fests Himself in the "clove carnation," in Helen, or Ninon, or "any clear and fearless man," yea, in Lawrence himself.

Man is a beautiful creation of God, as is woman. In "The Man of Tyre" the man went down to the sea to ponder about God. There he saw the woman standing nude in the water, "her back to the evening sky."

... in the cane-brake he clasped his hands in delight that could only be god-given, and murmured: Lol God is one god! But here in the twilight godly and lovely canes Aphrodite out of the sea towards me! God manifests Himself in man and through man in love. In this group of poems Lawrence has given us a series of affirmations about God and his creation, about man and his place in creation, but the emphasis is ever on the reality of existential Being, the supremacy of Being over Mind. 175 The next group of poems shows how God manifests Himself through

nature* "They Say the Sea is Loveless," "Whales Weep Not!" "Invocation

to the Moon," "Butterfly," and "Bavarian Gentians." The idea of one

poem leads into the next, but all of the poems are about life and love

and mortality. In the poem "They Say the Sea is Loveless" (p. 693)

Lawrence refutes the lovelessness ty filling his sea with dolphins

that "leap round Dionysos’ ship,” while in "Whales weep Not!" (p. 694)

he describes the gigantic procreative act of x-zhales mating; he con­

cludes the sea is neither loveless nor cold but contains "the hottest

blood of all." Where love is, there also is God manifested:

and all this happiness in the sea, in the salt where God is also love, but without words: and Aphrodite is the wife of whales most happy, happy she!

and Venus there too.

But Lawrence feels his mortality and writes his."Invocation to the Moon" (p. 695) indicating his readiness to be taken in:

Now I am at your gate you beauty, you lady of all nakedness! Now I must enter your mansion, and beg your gift Moon, G Moon, great lady of the heavenly few. Lawrence has met the sun by day in creativity, but at night he sinks doxmward to meet the night in sleep. Lawrence says in the Fantasia that the moon is the tide-turner. The moon is the great cosmic pole which calls us back, back out of our day-self, back through the moonlit darknesses of the sensual planes, to sleep.1®7

We move out of our daytime consciousness and dissolve back toward our

107Fantasia. p. 211. 176 elemental being where our blood, like the sea, responds to the pull

of the moon. Thus a great dynamic circuit is established according to Lawrence’s cosmology, stated in Fantasia of the Unconscious:

the circuit of the universe. . , . the positive infinite of the positive pole, the sun-pole, negative infinite of the negative pole, the moon-pole, {and} , . . midway between the two cosmic infinities lies the third, which is more than infinite. This is the Holy Ghost Life, individual life.3-0®

Of course Fantasia was conceived almost a decade before these “Last

Poems" and during that decade Lawrence became less dogmatic, more poetic about his "pseudo-philosophy" penned in 1921. But he never forwent his theory of Being even as he modified the cosmology. The universe is vital, and there is a dynamic interchange taking place among its vital elements. What Lawrence called the "Holy Ghost Life" in Fantasia he symbolized as the swan in Pansies stirring in the electron, and finally terms the Demiurge and God in "Last Poems."

The moon has served Lawrence well, for it has represented his "night being," his "night consummation," his "tide-turner." Under the spell of the moon "the soul retreats back into the sea of its own darkness; hence the "Invocation to the Moon" as Lawrence approaches the end of his life. The next two poems work well together as companion pieces. It is the fall of the year in "Butterfly" and in "Bavarian Gentians," past time for butterflies and flowers. Lawrence watches the butter­ fly flutter seaward and cries:

^°^Fantasia. p. 188.

1Q9Ibid.. pp. 211-212. 177 Farewell, farewell, lost soul! you have melted in the ciystalllne distance, it is enough! I saw you vanish into air. (p. 696)

The image and its implication are startling: a soul literally vanishing

into thin air, and Lawrence facing his approaching death. The delicacy

of the vanishing butterfly image in its seeming transparency juxtaposes

beautifully with images of the next poem "Bavarian Gentians" which is

frequently anthologized. "Bavarian Gentians" reveals a descent into

darkness, a vanishing into darkness, which contrasts with the vanishing

into airiness or into light of the "Butterfly" poem. Wfe recall Law­

rence’s analogue of the butterfly with Ursula’s action in Women in

Love, her taking experience as it presented itself, living vitally

from the very center of her being. Birkin tells her she has something

of the sun in her. In the poem "Butterfly" Lawrence utilizes the but­ terfly’s action positively and poetically. In Fantasia Lawrence

postulated the dual nature of man which must be brought into balance, the positive sun-pole of day and the negative moon-pole of night, the

light and the dark each making its own demands on the "Holy Ghost Life" that is the individual. At death, then, these soul elements would

separate out, the sun element returning to the light on the wings of the butterfly, the night element returning to the dark down the dark steps, petal by petal to the source of life from which the Bavarian

gentian sprung, to the realm of Demeter. The poems reveal the poetic soul in operation. Lawrence saw a butterfly flutter out to sea finally vanishing in the distance and made

of this event an analogue for his own gradually departing life spirit,

but his cosmology would require a polarization of the light with the 178 dark, another natural analogue, and his own blue Bavarian gentians came to his attention. Of course this is pure conjecture, but it would account for the difference in quality between the two poems.

The tone of "Butterfly" is colloquial: "Butterfly, why do you settle on my shoe, and sip the dirt on my shoe." In contrast, the tone of

"Bavarian Gentians" sounds very like an incantation: "lead me then, lead the way./ Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!/ let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch . . . ." Then, too, the butterfly- disappearing into space is a visual image and rather literal. We see the butterfly disappear but we do not journey with it. On the other hand, the descent into darkness is metaphorical but it involves the speaker and carries the reader along with the speaker as we make the symbolic descent into darkness. "Bavarian Gentians" merits the attention it has received but its meaning is enhanced by its companion piece "Butterfly."

The next poems are also about death: "Lucifer," "The Breath of

Life," "Silence," "The Hands of God," "Pax," "Abysmal Immortality,"

"Only Man," but as the titles indicate, Iawretnce is seeking to main­ tain the unity with God as he passes frcm life to death. Lawrence does not talk about Christain immortality nor about the Christian concept of heaven and hell, nor about a reincarnation, nor even about the Greek concept of Hades despite references to Persephone, Pluto, Dis, and Lucifer. He sees the moment of death as a great stillness we are told in "The Breath of Life," while in "Silence," death is a silence absolute, a "great hush of going frcm this into that." (p. 699)

The one thing Lawrence fears most is the falling out of the hands of 179 God "into the ungodly knowledge / of myself as I am without God"

(p. 699). He asks whether Lucifer fell through knowledge, and beseeches in the last stanza of "The Hands of God":

Save me from that, 0 God! Let me never know myself apart frcm the living God!

Man alone can fall "out of the hands of the living God" for only man is capable of having knowledge of himself:

No animal, no beast nor creeping thing no cobra nor hyaena nor scorpion nor hideous white ant can slip entirely through the fingers of the hands of God into the abyss of self-knowledge, knowledge of the self-apart-from-God.

Here Lawrence makes explicit his one great horror for man, man’s capacity for knowledge of himself-apart-frora-God. Such knowledge is purely mental, the death-in-life about which Lawrence has spoken so often. When man denies his living connection with God, manifested by his living body in and through which man has his Being, if man is ashamed of his living bocfcf and its functions, then man denies his creator; man in his mental conceit indicates he knows better than

God what is "right" and what is "proper." He partakes of the knowl­ edge of the self-apart-from-God. Neither the lion nor the rose shows concern for its Being, for doing what it does; only man, who has eaten frcm the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, can curse God for having created him; on the other hand, he can praise God through the jpyous use of the body which has been given him and through which God expresses the fullness of His creation.

In the "Lord’s Prayer" Lawrence makes clear what man ought to expect for man. Man says in his daily prayer, "For thine is the 180 kingdom, the power, and the glory," but Lawrence believes that for

man as man there is also a kingdom and a power and a glory just as

there is for the nightingale, for the fox, for the goose;

All things that turn to thee have their kingdom, their power, and their glory.

Like the kingdom of the nightingale at twilight Whose power and glory I have often heard and felt.

Like the kingdom of the fox in the dark yapping in his power and his glory which is death to the goose.

Like the power and the glory of the goose in the mist honking over the lake.

And I, a naked man, calling calling to thee for my mana, my kingdom, my power, and my glory, (p. 704)

Man is a part of the universe, a part of God’s creation, and he par­ takes of the same elements as other participants in the universe as the pre-Socratic Greeks taught; therefore he, too, has his own proper kingdom, power, and glory, as does the nightingale, the fox, the goose.

The poems that follow the "Lord’s Prayer" concern man’s partici­ pation in the four elements: "Mana of the Sea," "Salt," "The Four," "The Boundary Stone," and "Spilling the Salt." Man’s blood is linked to the sea; he feels "the rollers of the sea" running down his arms and breaking an the hands, running down his thighs, breaking against the ground. Pan’s blood is linked to the sea because the sea has the power to stir man’s blood, because man’s blood responds to the moon as does the sea, because man’s blood like the sea is hot and wet as Lawrence proclaimed in "They Say the Sea is Loveless" and in "Whales

Weep Not!" 181 Lawrence’s fascination with the pre-Socratic philosophy is again demonstrated in this series of poems. "The Four," despite the scien­ tific era in which we live, makes a powerful poetic appeal*

The Four

To our senses, the elements are four and have ever been, and will ever be for they are the elements of life, of poetry, and of perception, the four Great Ones, the Four Roots, the First Four of Fire and the Wet, Earth and the wide Air of the world.

To find the other many elements, you must go to the laboratory and hunt them down. But the four we have always with us, they are our world. Or rather, they have us with them.

Thus in "Salt" (p. 705) Lawrence proclaims that salt is the product of sun-scorched water which results from the "eternal opposition / between the two great ones, Fire, and the Wfet." And in "The Boundary

Stone" (p. 706) salt becomes the boundary between blood and sweat. As always, Lawrence’s observation, of a natural, daily phenomenon is both acute and poetic with a direct appeal to our own natural perceptions. Lawrence would not have us entirely forego our scientific knowledge in favor of his poetic observations, but he does not want man to discredit or to forget what his senses perceive lest the veiy senses atrophy. The poem "Itystic" (p. 707) makes clear that portion of man’s experience that cannot be subjected to scientific measurement but which Lawrence would not let man lose. The poem begins with the line

"They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience is considered." Thus he says his taste experience when he tastes in 182 the apple "the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth / and the insistence of the sun," this taste experience is called mystic,

"which means a liar." The quarrel with the scientist continues in

"Anaxagoras" who proclaimed that all things are mixed so that by extension of this principle even snow has an element of blackness.

That they call science, and reality. I call it mental conceit and mystification and nonsense, for pure snow is white to us with a lovely bloom of whiteness upon white in which the soul delights and the senses have an experience of bliss.

All Lawrence asks is that man trust his sense experience. If man tastes sun in the apple, that experience is real, not mystic; if he sees nothing but "whiteness upon white" in a snow field, that experi­ ence is real. If man is persuaded that the "whiteness upon white" which he sees with his eyes really contains the "seeds of black," he is the victim of "mental conceit and mystification / and nonsense," not the heir of reality.

Despite his quarrel with Anaxagoras’ principle of opposites,

Lawrence follows the Empedoclean principle of tension between Love and Strife. In a number of poems Lawrence discusses the "sunderers" in opposition to the "angels of the Kiss," particularly in the poems

"Walk Whrily" (p. 707) and in "Kissing and Horrid Strife" (p. 709).

The sunderers are as much a part of life as the angels, life means both delight and dread, daimons and demons.

But life is not for the dead vanity of knowing better, nor the blank cold superiority, nor silly conceit of being immune, nor puerility of contradictions like saying snow is black, or desire is evil. 183 Lawrence sought the balance between Strife and Love, not a permanent plateau somewhere between the two extremes, but rather a swing of the pendulum encompassing both, for he says that

. . . . while we live the kissing and communing cannot cease nor yet the striving and the horrid strife, (p. 710)

Perhaps in death we can know "oneness and poised immunity," but such a state of balance is impossible in life. Lawrence sees Satan's fall as an example of the poised immunity. He says in "When Satan Fell"

(p. 710) that Satan "fell to keep a balance" because the "Lord

Almighty rose a bit too high."

Here in the "Last Poems" we get an amplification of seme of the message we heard in Birds. Beasts and Flowers, ideas that have been pondered over for almost a decade; however the structure of these poems is veiy close to the structure of the better poems of

Pansies, and the arrangement of poems by groups is closer to the

Pansies than to Birds. Beasts and Flowers. Thus once the idea of

Satan is introduced, Lawrence must next grapple with the idea of evil. What then is evil? Evil is the subject of the next large group of poems: "Doors," "Evil is Homeless," "What Then is Evil?" "The Evil World-Soul," "The Wandering Cosmos," "Death is Not Evil, Evil is Mechanical," "Strife," "The Late War," "Murder," "Murderous

Weapons," and "Departure." Earlier Lawrence had discussed "a third thing" which makes an atom an atom in the poem entitled "A Third

Thing." In "Doors" (p. 710) Lawrence describes evil as a "third 184 thing" but obviously this third thing is not the same as that which makes an atom an atom. He repeats his central position that life is comprised of light and dark, spiritual and sensual, the love of the day, "the bright doors where souls go gaily in," and the love of the night, "the dark doors where souls pass silently": these are the two aspects of life in which the living must participate gladly; but the third thing, evil, Lawrence insists, "evil is another thing! in another place!" Evil has no dwelling-place, not even in Hell, is the message of "Evil is Homeless." Evil may be found among men who "sit in machines," among those who

sit in the grey mist of movement which moves not and going which goes not and doing which does not and being which is not for the being is no longer alive and spontaneous but has been reduced to a cog in a machine, the great death-in-life of which Lawrence had such a horror.

The wheel in the machine is the great evil in the world of man; the wheel in the mind of man "which turns on the hub of the ego" (p.?12) is the great evil in man. These two things comprise the only evil in the world, and both are possible only for man. Man alone has invented a machine before which and in which he participates mechanically, and man alone is capable of knowing himself in his own "detached and self- activated ego" (p. 713) apart from God. Both evils act to separate man from his spontaneous being; both evils are death-in-life.

Man should travel through life as the earth travels around the sun, not in the perfect circle prescribed by the wheel, but as 185 a wanderer through untravelled space

for the earth, like the sun, is a wanderer. Their going round each time is a step onwards, we know not whither

says Lawrence in "The Wandering Cosmos" (p. 713), his vision of an

expanding and evoluting universe. He reiterates Socrates’ advice,

"know thyself," in the poem "Death is Not Evil, Evil is Mechanical"

(p. 713), but he again urges man to experience his full mortality, his fullest Being as

a thing of kisses and strife a lit-up shaft of rain a calling column of blood a rose tree bronzey with thorns a mixture of yea and nay a rainbow of love and hate a wind that blows back and forth a creature of beautiful peace, like a river and a creature of conflict, like a cataract for should man deny that mortality, that fullness of Being in all its demands, then Lawrence warns:

. . . thou shalt begin to spin round on the hub of the obscene ego a grey void thing that goes without wandering a machine that in itself is nothing a centre of the evil world.

Five short poems conclude the section on what is evil, "Strife,

"The Late War," "Murder," "Murderous Weapons," and "Departure" which makes a listing of all the evils that confront man: wheels, machines, the will to make money, and all the abstractions of civilization— finance, science, education, jazz, films, the wireless, and finally politics. Lawrence has had his say about what comprises life and death-in life. His final poems all concern death. Aldington suggests in his 186 introduction to the "Last Poems" that "Lawrence probably meant to make this {these last poems concerning death] one long poem . . . but ... he was too weaiy" (p, 598). Aldington unwittingly submits evidence to the contrary, however, for he indicates that the poems are probably fair copies, and certainly "The Ship of Death" from the manuscript seems completed and finished fcy comparison with other extant versions.^10 Furthermore, the organization of the final poems is like that of the earlier poems in this manuscript and like that of the Pansies, a group of poems all of which center on a given subject, in this case on various aspects of death.

The group of poems opens with the remarkable "The Ship of

Death" which is comprised of ten short sections. Sections I and II present the two basic images: the falling fruit of autumn and the little ship of death.

The Ship of Death

I

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit and the long journey towards oblivion. The apples falling like great drops of dew to bruise themselves an exit from themselves. And it is time to go, to bid farewell to one’s own self, and find an exit from the fallen self. II Have you built your ship of death, 0 have you? 0 build your ship of death, for you will need it.

■^°cf. other versions printed in Appendix III, pp. 956-961. 187 The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.

And death is on the air like a smell of ashes J Ah! can’t you smell it?

And in the bruised boty, the frightened soul finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold that blows upon it through the orifices.

Wherever possible Lawrence used natural analogues to help man discover what was natural for himself. Here Lawrence utilizes the autumn meta­ phor to indicate approaching death, but the falling apples "like great drops of dew" present a fresh image of man’s fall from himself. At the point of death there actually does occur an exit from oneself, a falling away, just as when the apple stem separates from the tree there comes a change in the apple.

Although the first stanza sounds personal, Lawrence extends the meaning beyond himself to mankind with the first question of

Section II. Elsewhere Lawrence has postulated the end of this civilization as we know it. ife each need to prepare our ship of death for the "grim frost" is at hand for this civilization; it is autumn for this race of men; the very smell of death "like the smell of ashes" is everywhere. Again we are reminded of the destruction by fire that Lawrence has predicted elsewhere. The tone is sombre but not ominous, however. The "ship of death" holds out a promise, a means for the soul's "long journey towards oblivion." The soul is personified—"frightened," "shrinking," and "wincing"--as it readies itself for the exit "from the fallen self." The soul already begins to feel the chill of death. 188

Section III takes up the question of suicide with its allusion

to Hamlet’s suicide soliloquy (III:i:77).

Ill And can a man his own quietus make with a bare bodkin?

With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make a bruise or break of exit for his life; but is that a quietus, 0 tell me, is it quietus?

Surely not so! for how could murder, even self-murder ever a quietus make?

Lawrence has been ill and undoubtedly suffering for a very long time.

In another poem he says "It is not easy to die, . . ./ For death

canes when he will . . ./ we can be dying . . . and longing utterly to die/ yet death will not cone." But suicide is antithetical to

Lawrence’s whole concept of Being, his reverence for life. Lawrence

concludes that the self must exit in peace if it is to discover the

quiet it seeks. Any violation of Being destroys peace. Section IV

is transitional.

IV 0 let us talk of quiet that we know, that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet of a strong heart at peace! How can we this, our own quietus, make?

Section V answers in part the question of Section IV: it reasserts the need for the ship of death, the "little ark." 189 V

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

And die the death, the long and painful death that lies between the old self and the new.

Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised, already our souls are oozing through the exit of the cruel bruise.

Already the dark and endless ocean of the end is washing in through the breaches of our wounds, already the flood is upon us. 0 build your ship of death, your little ark and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and.wine for the dark flight down oblivion.

As the apple falls and is bruised, so the body falls and is bruised and the soul begins to ooze toward the exit in preparation for the exit. One feels the approaching death and one must prepare his ship.

The "little ark" Lawrence saw when he visited the Etruscan tombs:

the little bronze ship of death that should bear him over to the other world, the vases of jewels for his arraying, the vases of small dishes, the little bronze statuettes and tools, the weapons, the armour . .

Lawrence was struck by the poetry of the Etruscan way of life mani­ fested by the Etruscan way of death. He read the history of the

Etruscan in the low-relief carvings and stucco reliefs on the walls and pillars of their tombs and marvelled at the simplicity, the natural proportion, the "free-breasted naturalness and spontaneity" which he discovered there. For Lawrence, the true quality of the

•^•^•Etruscan Places (London: Martin Seeker, 1932; New York: The Viking Press, 1932; reprinted in Compass Books Edition, 1957), p. 23. 190

Etruscan was an "ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life, no need to force the mind or the soul in any direction." What he found true of the Etruscan in life held also for the Etruscan in death, for

death, to the Etruscan, was a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. It was neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven nor a purgatory of torment. It was just a natural continuance of the fullness of life. Everything was in terms of life, of living.3-3^

Therefore, Lawrence advises that modern man learn from the Etruscan, build his ship of death, for VI

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises. We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.

life are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are tying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

VII

Wfe are dying, we are dying, so all we can do is now be willing to die, and to build the ship of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food and little dishes, and all accoutrements fitting and ready for the departing soul. Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith with its store of food and little cooking pans and change of clothes,

l^Btruscan Places, p. 26. 191 upon the flood’s black waste upon the waters of the end upon the sea of death, where still we sail darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

There is no port, there is nowhere to go only the deepening blackness darkening still blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood darkness at one with darkness, up and down and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction ary more, and the little ship is there; yet she is gone. She is gone! gone! and yet somewhere she is there. Nowhere!

VIII

And everything is gone, the body is gone completely under, gone, entirely gone. The upper darkness is heavy as the lower, between them the little ship is gone she is gone.

It is the end, it is oblivion.

As we traveled down the darkness of the Bavarian gentian, so here too we are traveling down the darkening flood into oblivion. It would seen as if the little ship had fulfilled its function and slipped away leaving behind whatever remains of Being, aware only of the utter dark­ ness, of an oblivion between an upper and a lower world both equally dark. But Lawrence’s vision carries him still further on his journey.

In Section IX the ship is not gone. Tiverton sees the last two sections of the poem as a rising action which "explains why the Ship is worth building, why the journey is worth undertaking. "H3 it seems that just as complete annihilation must take place before the resurrection could

•L1^Tiverton, p. 121. 192 occur in "New Heaven and Barth," here too Lawrence takes us into obliv­ ion, except that here the poetiy is so much more profound, more con­ vincing, The difference, of course, is that in "New Heaven and Earth"

Lawrence is again too personal while in "The Ship of Death" he carries the reader with him on a metaphorical ship. Having achieved oblivion at the close of Section VUI the poem continues.

IX

And yet out of eternity, a thread separates itself on the blackness, a horizontal thread that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.

Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume a little higher? Ah wait, wait, for there’s the dawn, the cruel dawn of coming back to life out of oblivion.

Wit, wait, the little ship drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey of a flood-dawn.

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow and strangely, 0 chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

Amazingly the speaker records "the cruel dawn of coming back to life" once again. The little ship drifts somewhere between two worlds until the speaker is aware of the colors yellow and rose flushing up. The lines suggest the approaching dawn and the sun about to rise, first the ashy grey, then the flush of yellow, and finally the flush of rose, as if the little boat is winging its way sunward out of the dark night.

We have been well prepared for such a transition of Being in all of the light and dark imagery which precedes the "Ship of Death." Here Lawrence 193 takes his ship through the dark night of the soul, through oblivion,

a sleep and a forgetting as the final poems suggest, into the light

of a new day. Just as Wordsworth had suggested we come from God

which is our home, here Lawrence suggests in Section X a return of the soul to its source.

X

The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely. And the little ship wings heme, faltering and lapsing on the pink flood, and the frail soul steps out, into her house again filling the heart with peace.

Swings the heart renewed with peace even of oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death, oh build it! for you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

This voyage of affirmation is a fitting conclusion to a life that has been a continual affirmation. Lawrence went a long struggle with death as these final poems attest, not that he was afraid of death or unwilling to die, but he discovered "death comes when he will/ not when we will him," and "it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through/ the door, even when it opens," the messages of "Dif­ ficult Death" (p. 720) and of "All Souls' Day" (p. 721). He felt a certainty about his own death and transition to "the

other world" for he knew he had been fully alive, but Lawrence felt a

great pity for those who were unequipped to take the journey. He wrote two poems about that group of unhappy dead to which Dante had

referred as having lived lives "without praise or blame." Such souls 194 are "all unequipped to take the long, long voyage1’ says Lawrence in

’’The Houseless Dead" (p. 722). He warns the reader in "Beware the

Unhappy Dead!" (p. 722) to "set a place" for "the angry unappeased

dead/ that were thrust out of life" lest they "lay you waste" in the

November of the year.

Death is like a sleep and a forgetting he reminds us in "Sleep,"

"Sleep and Waking," "Fatigue," and "Forget."

Sleep

Sleep is the shadow of death, but not only that. Sleep is a hint of lovely oblivion. When I am gone, completely lapsed and gone and healed from all this ache of being.

Lawrence’s whole life has been an affirmation of Being, but this kind

of being also makes a tremendous demand for it is vital, energy con­ suming, peaceless; well he might complain of the "ache of being" as he approached death and looked forward to the "lovely oblivion" and the ensuing peace. He compares death with sleep, for in sleep "I am not," for sleep is oblivion, a forgetting.

The little poem "Forget" succinctly summarizes Lawrence’s theory

of Being: Forget To be able to forget is to be able to yield to God who dwells in deep oblivion. Chly in sheer oblivion are we with God. For when we know in full, we have left off knowing.

This experience of knowing one can discover only as he yields himself to Being, to self-forgetful experiencing. Such yielding is a kind of death and rebirth into life, for one has come into contact with the 195 very Ground of all Being in the experiencing. Of course one cannot

know the experience of death ahead of time; therefore, we can only-

know in full after we "have left off knowing," until we can yield

ourselves to God, until we ourselves have achieved oblivion. The

same message is repeated in "Know-All." ¡fen knows nothing till he knows how not-to-know.

And the greatest teachers will tell you: The end of all knowledge is oblivion sweet, dark oblivion, when I cease even from myself, and am consummated, Man can know only in part when he experiences his being in himself apart from the universe; only when he is united with the universe, unaware of himself, does he achieve any fullness of knowledge, and these glimmerings of Being we call intimations of immortality for in such experiencing we glimpse the unity, the oneness, the oblivion of self, and discover the self merged with God. Thus man builds taber­ nacles and temples, "centres here and there of silence and forgetting" where man can go and seek oblivion of self, places where "the silent soul/ may sink into god at last . . . / may cease from being / in the sweet wholeness of oblivion." As Lawrence approached his own death he discovered the shadows "folding, folding/ around my soul and spirit;" he alternately sank into "good oblivion," and reawoke "like a new-opened flower/ . . . dipped again in God, and new-created," and knew again he was "in the hands of the unknown God" who sent him forth each "new morning, a new man." But the experience of renewal is not easy, as the three line poem "Change" attests: 196

Do you think it is easy to change? Ah, it is veiy hard to change and be different. It means passing through the waters of oblivion.

One must have his ship ready for this last perilous journey across the dark waters.

How can man know death until he has lived? And can man say he has lived until he has known change, the kind of change that means the extinction of the former self, the passing through the waters of oblivion, or being "burnt, burnt alive, burnt down/ to hot and floc­ culent ash" as the emblematic poem "Phoenix" suggests:

Phoenix

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.

The phoenix renews her youth only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down to hot and flocculent ash. Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest with strands of down like floating ash Shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle, immortal bird.

Being does not end with death; it undergoes change. "The history of the cosmos/ is the histoiy of the struggle of becoming./ ... we ' 114 see/ there is no end to the birth of God." Lawrence had had his vision.

114 frcm "God is Born," More Pansies, pp 682-683. CHAPTER VII

AN EVALUATION

Lawrence's recognition as a great modern poet is long overdue.

There is no doubt, however, that already lawrence is considered one

of the seminal minds of the modern period. He has achieved the first

rank in the novel genre, standing in the company of James Joyce and

Virginia Woolf as a great innovator. His very great talent as a

novelist has thus far overshadowed his poetic genius, but it is pre­

cisely his poetic genius which has made Lawrence the great novelist—

his ability to recreate man's experience with all its emotional

coloration, to make it come alive on the printed page, to make it

happen. When he achieves this in his novels, he does so by poetic

means, by the analogue, for example, as we saw in the "Cheriy Robber"

scene from Sons and Lovers; or more subtly and skillfully in the

harvesting scene of The Rainbow where the action is the dance; to

the poetic triumph of the "moony" scene of Women in Love where Bir­

kin shatters the moon, and meaning goes beyond words. Such a scene

is sheer poetry. As Lawrence created the poet, however, the poet comes to

supplant the novelist, and this transition can be demonstrated

quite readily. Critics today agree that Lawrence wrote his best novels prior to 1921: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love.

It does not have to be further demonstrated that these novels make the transition toward poetiy. Lawrence himself recognized the great 198 difference in technique between Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow. And while there is much poetry in The Rainbow. Women in Love is prose- poetry: the dances, the Mino, the rabbit, the horse, the water party, the "Moony" chapter, all attest to the poetic technique of that novel.

By contrast, Lawrence's poetry prior to 1921 is unremarkable for the most part, with one exception: the underlying structure of Look! Vfe

Have Come Through! is an innovation—the poems each representing an instant of experience that when taken together make up a total exper­ ience, a "novel" as Amy Lowell suggested. But Lawrence was still creating the poet in 1917» and the poet comes off better in the novels where he had room to move around. to repeat himself. That is how he achieves his power in such scenes as "Cherry Robbers," "Harvesting Dance," and "Moony,"—through incremental repetition. However, he was still confined in his poetry by the traditional poetic; his rhythms had loosened up considerably, but he was still bound by the demands of rhyme. The novels after 1921—Aaron's Rod. Kangaroo. The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley1 s Lover—although each has its magical, poetic moments, are a disappointment by comparison to the novels prior to 1921, particularly in comparison to The Rainbow and Women in Love.

On the other hand, Lawrence's poetry soars after 1921. Critics agree that Lawrence's finest poetry appears in Birds. Beasts and

Flowers and in Last Poems, and have kind things to say about some of the Pansies. I would submit that with the creation of the poet (1917-

1923) there came a decline in the novelist, and that we have not yet 199 given the poet his recognition because we have not yet seen the genius that informs the poems.

Lawrence gave us clues, he put up signposts all along the way, but we had not yet learned to read the language. Vfe were still think­ ing in terms of the traditional metrics, or in terms of our habitual way of reading experience. Virginia Woolf would refer to us as a generation of "Mrs. Browns.” What Lawrence did was to carry his experience as novelist into the poems. His first experiment with the idea resulted in Look! We Have Cone Through! If the experiment is a failure, it fails because Lawrence was not yet created as a poet.

He was not able to create the emotional atmosphere which would permit such lines as "My little one, my big one, cuddle close to me" and make them seem appropriate to the situation, even though we know that under certain emotional conditions, people do talk just like that. Furthermore, for the most part, the Look! poems are still constricted by the rhyming tradition. Only about a third of those poems are in free verse. But I think I see now and tend to agree with what Amy Lowell meant when she said the poems made up a "novel greater even than Sons and Lovers.n In any case, the experiment paved the way for the poetic conception and the poetic triumph of

Birds. Beasts and Flowers. Apparently the genius must not recognize how very pedestrian the ordinaiy reader is by comparison with himself. Lawrence made clear the pattern of Birds, Beasts and Flowers not only by labelling the various sections, obviously with a degree of order, but he 200 included provocative prose introductions to each section. Thaihe arranged the poems within each section on a chronological basis which is repeated consistently section by section; and still we insist on reading these poems as individual "nature studies." One mark of the great artistiy is that a portion of "Reptiles" can be made to stand alone as "Tortoises," published as a separate volume of poems; but the tortoise plight is man’s, as Lawrence makes abundantly clear if we read with ary kind of perceptiveness. The innovation is that the poems are intended to be read as an unfolding history of Being, each poem contributing to the whole, yet each poem whole and complete in itself. However, the total picture is of infinitely greater importance than the sum of its parts, a thesis which Lawrence firmly believed.

We see the pattern, obviously, in the "Tortoise" section, but fail to see the organic structure of the whole. Birds. Beasts and Flowers is not a collection of poems, it is a History of Being.

Lawrence turned next to the most difficult task of all, and it occupied him to the end of his life. If Birds, Beasts and Flowers presents a History of Being, it is a record of extrinsic Being, observable and verifiable. On the other hand, Lawrence set himself the task of recording intrinsic Being, a record of Being as it occurs in the moment of experiencing, a record of how it feels to Be. Again Lawrence put up a signpost, a four page "Introduction to Pansies," in order to explain the Pansies, for they needed explanation. Lawrence assured us this poetry was not to be read or judged as ordinary poetry, it was a new thing, a different kind of poetry: 201 they do not pretend to be half-baked lyrics or melodies in the American measure. They are thoughts which run through the modéra mind and body, each having its own separate exis­ tence, yet each of them combining with all the others to make up a complete state of mind. It suits the modern temper better to have its state of mind made up of apparently irrelevant thoughts that scurry in different directions yet belong to the same nest. . . (p. 417). (italics mine).

Each "thought" is a moment of Being in the instant NOW taking its

form, "with its own blood of emotion," coming as much "from the

heart and the genitals as from the head," that when taken together

make up the inner life of a man of genius. Such "thoughts" cannot

be read or judged as we read and judge traditional poetry because

they move out toward the edge of a genre just as Women in Love moves toward the edge of the novel genre, or better still, as

Joyce's Ulysses moves to the edge of the novel genre. These thoughts

make up a record of inner experience as it occurs mcment by moment,

but again they need one another, as our own thoughts need one another,

to make up a complete state of mind. Lawrence is a great emotional

realist as well as a very careful observer. He recognized that thoughts are always accompanied by emotions, are colored by our

emotions, and that our moods change. He insists that the thoughts

come from the mind and body rather than just from the mind simply because the mind does not have emotion and emotion without mind is a-rational; therefore, what must be revealed is that inward state of Being which comprises both the emotional and the rational as they combine to make up real experience as it happens. What the thoughts reveal when placed side by side is that great flux which is our state 202

of Being, sometimes happy, sometimes sentimental, sometimes angry,

sometimes reverent—and the Pansies reflects all these moods as they

color one’s thinking.

Lawrence is modern in that he is creating his life as he goes

along. He sees art as a life-constructing function, as a means of realizing Being, and he has to create his own set of values since there are no values ready-made that will suit his purpose. He has moved out in front of us and must make his way as best he can. But as with ary trail breaker, he has shown the way in the Pansies. for he would have us recover our capacity for emotion, for spontaneous and joyous experiencing, for religious experience—all of which makes us uniquely human and unique human beings. In this sense, then, the Pansies serve as "heartsease" or as "tender administra­ tions to the mental and emotional wounds we suffer from," just as his "Introduction to Pansies” promised. The Pansies are far more successful than we have realized, for the method that informs the Pansies is the same that informs

Last Poems which critics agree contains some of Iawrence's finest poetiy. That the Last Poems are treated separately does not make them that far different from Pansies except that they move to a cosmological scale as Lawrence contemplates death. They are less in the realm of the immediate, the instant NOW, and therefore they seem more like the poetry we are used to, but they still work like the Pansies in that they are linked together by mood and idea, and show the flux of Being as one approaches death. 203 Last Poems are especially important as they reveal Lawrence’s final pronouncement about Being, the theme which has informed his poetry from first to last. "Ship of Death" satisfies because it affirms Lawrence’s conviction of the importance of living vitally which he held from the first expression of it in "The Wild Common," and it satisfies because it affirms the hope that Lawrence held out for the possibility of resurrection which is confirmed in his last emblematic poem "Phoenix."

Lawrence’s great contribution to modern poetiy, then, is his insistence on emotional realism, on how it feels to Be in the very moment of the experience. He reveals the inward state of Being. He tried to capture experience in all its immediacy, in the instant NOW, and then to align these moments so that they make up a pattern of experience. It took a very great intelligence with a veiy great faith in Being to make the break with rationalism and its accompany­ ing sterility in an attempt to restore the emotions to a position of dignity. Lawrence himself was confronted with the problem of the existentialist, that all being was his own creation, the result of his own mind. Great was the relief when he discovered the "other," something that was not the result of his own creation. He recounts that experience--and it is crucial—in "New Heaven and Earth," of

Lookl We Have Ccme Through t It is significant that he made this discovery at the moment of his highest achievement in the novel.

Much of the struggle for Being is recounted in The Rainbow but more 204 especially in Women in Love. Having discovered the "other," Lawrence was still confronted with the problem of what man has "in common" with other Being, and this becomes the subject of Birds, Beasts and Flowers.

He does not entirely escape frcm the problem of pantheism as Father

Tiverton pointed out, but he finally resolves his problem with a poetic rendering of the Trinity. He does not deny Jesus as the Son of God, although he thought Jesus was never fully man—He was all spirituality, totally lacking in sensuality, and therefore He could never entirely understand the plight of man. Lawrence never fully identifies God either—except as "light," as "creativity," as "Demi-urge." The Holy

Spirit Lawrence discovered in every living thing—in the electron, within; and thus Lawrence postulates that what is godly is vital, creative, very Being itself, NOW, in the moment of experience, Being in the process of Becoming. Therefore, he believed that as we live fully, vitally, spontaneously, from our very deepest centers of being, as we BE, we manifest God in our very Being. Our final judgment must be, then, that Lawrence is not only a great modern poet, but a great modern religious poet yet to receive his due recognition. A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 20b?

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aldington, Richard. D. H. Lawrence; Portrait of a Genius But . . . London: William Heinemann, 1950.

Allen, Gay Wilson. American Prosody. New York: American Book Company, 1935. Alvarez, A. Stewards of Excellence. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958.

Amin, Arnold. D. H. Lawrence and America. London: The Linden Press, 1958.

Auden, W. H. The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1962.

Blackmur, R. P. Language as Gesture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. Burnet, John. Early Greek Philosophy. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908.

Carruth, Hayden. "A Meaning of Robert Lowell," Hudson Review, XX (Autumn, 1967), 429-447. Coffman, Jr., Stanley K. Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951. Elsbree, Langdon. "D. H. Lawrence, Homo Ludens. and the Dance," The D. H. Lawrence Review. I (Spring, 1968), 1-30. E. T. (pseud. Jessie Chambers). D. H. Lawrence. A Personal lie cord. London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. Freeman, Mary. D. H. Lawrence: A Basic Study of His Ideas. Gaines­ ville: University of Florida Press, 1955. Fu, Shaw-Shien. "Image as Related to Theme in D. H. Lawrence's Poetiy." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1967. Hogan, Robert. "Lawrence's 'Song of a Man Who Has Come Through'," Explicator, XVII (April, 1959), 51. Kenmare, Dallas. Fire-Bird: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Philosophical Library, 1952. 207 Lawrence, D. H. Amores. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1916.

______. Apocalypse. Florence: G. Orioli, 1931.

______• Bay; A Book of Poems by D. H. Lawrence. Westminster : Cyril W. Beaumont, 1919.

______. Birds. Beasts and Flowers. London: Martin Seeker, 1923.

______The Collected Letters of D. H. lawrence. 2 vols. Edited by Hariy T. Moore. New York: Viking Press, 1962.

______. The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence. 2 vols. London: Martin Seeker, 1928. ~

______. The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. 2 vols. Edited fcry Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. New York: Viking Press, 1964.

______. D. H. Lawrence : The Complete Poems. 3 vols. London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1957.

______. D. H. Lawrence ; Selected Poems. Edited by Kenneth Rexroth. New York: Viking Press, 1959.

______. Etruscan Places. London: Martin Seeker, 1932.

. Fire and Other Poems by D. H. Lawrence. San Francisco: Grabhom Press, 1940.

______. Lady Chatterley's Lover. London; Seeker, 1933. ______. Last Poems. Edited by Richard Aldington and Giuseppe Orioli. Florence: G. Orioli, 1932.

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D. H. LAWRENCE: THE MAKING OF A POET

Hubertien H. Williams

An Abstract of a Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Ausugt 1968

Approved by

Department of English WILLIAMS, HUBERTIEN H. Ph. D., August, 1968. English

D. S* Lawrence: The Making of a Post. (209 PP.)

Faculty Adviser: John J. Gross

Long recognized as one of the seminal minds in the modern period, D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) has achieved the first rank in the novel genre; however, he has not as yet achieved his due recog­ nition as a great modern, religious poet. This study traced the creating of the poet by following the emerging theme suggested in his first poem "The Wild Common" where Lawrence postulates his own being by means of his sensory experience.

Hampered by the constriction of rhyme in his early poems,

Lawrence did his best work prior to 1923 in the novel; however, his novelistic achievement—Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love—reveal his growing poetic talents. Look! We Have Come Through1

(1917) helped Lawrence recognize his theme as well as provided the training ground for his transition into free verse. The last poems in that volume, especially "New Heaven and Earth" and "Manifesto," recount Lawrence’s discovery of the "other." Thereafter, Lawrence set himself the task of investigating the nature of Being.

Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) marks the triumph of the poet over the novelist. Carefully structured, and far more than a series of little nature studies, these poems, when taken together, present a history of Being which follows a loose biological time scale; they reveal other Being as it related to man, tracing man’s condition from his prelapsarian state through his decline to the present—an extrinsic study of Being. 2

Pansies (1929) provides an intrinsic study of Being. Again

the poems need to be taken together. As in Lookt, each poem is a

record of a moment of experience. Each "pansy" is a "thought,"

rising from mind and body, each with its emotional coloration. The

reader is called upon to supply the continuity from "thought" to

"thought" so that when taken together, the thoughts make up an inner

life in all its emotional flux. The poems are not to be taken as so many separate aesthetic objects even though many of them stand alone.

Last Poems (1932) shows a continuation of the method of

Pansies, but whereas Pansies treated primarily of man’s relation to society, Last Poems deals with man's relation to the universe

and to God as man approaches death. Lawrence identified the Holy

Spirit as a little "sun," a vital spark, "within," often within the electron, set in motion by God Who is Demi-urge, or light or the'"sun of suns." But God manifests Himself only in the living

Being. Thus Jesus, "with a body and with needs, and a lovely spirit," also needed to manifest Himself in body’. Both "Ship of Death" and

"Phoenix" show the possibility of resurrection.

Lawrence is modern in that he was making his life as he went along. He saw his art as a life-constructing function, a means of realizing Being. He is modern in that he extended poetry to the edge of the genre in his desire to express emotional reality, to describe Being as it feels. Because he is innovative, because we have not yet learned how to read his poetry, we have missed the

great poetic achievement. Lawrence was a great novelist to 1923; thereafter, the novelist declined as the poet soared.