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
Lawrence is famous, or notorious, for his novels, but he also wrote poetry throughout his career. At three important phases of Lawrence’s life, poetry became his primary form of writing:
- in the first year of his relationship with Frieda von Richthofen (1913), resulting in the volume Look! We have come through!
- the two years he sent in Sicily (1920 to 1922): Birds, Beasts and Flowers
- in the last year of his life: More Pansies and Last Poems
The complete works runs to just short of 1,000 poems. The common view is that a large number of these are not really successful. He was very hit and miss as a poet and hit and miss within individual poems. In this Penguin edition, Keith Sagar selected 150 ‘really successful, achieved poems’. He thinks they justify the claim that Lawrence was not just a good but a great poet.
Lawrence’s published books of poetry were:
- Love Poems and others (1913)
- Amores (1916)
- Look! We have come through! (1917)
- New Poems (1918)
- Bay: a book of poems (1919)
- Tortoises (1921)
- Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923)
- The Collected Poems of D.H. Lawrence (1928)
- Pansies (1929)
- Nettles (1930)
- Last Poems (1932)
A scholarly overview would mention how he started off in the 1910s writing traditional, rhymed verse, cast in regular stanzas, in a manner influenced by Thomas Hardy; to this format he added his own knowledge of the West Midlands vernacular.
But his most striking, popular and anthologised poems are from much later, when he had developed an extremely flexible style based on free verse. This meant his lines are not cramped into regular quatrains, or end with predictable rhymes, but each line is as long as it needs to be to express its thought or image.
Dialect poem: Violets
For me the chief pleasure of poetry is nothing to do with the subject matter – I don’t care whether it’s about love or death or model railways – the pleasure is in the vivid use of language, in phrases which leap off the page and expand your mind. And this is something to do with the speed with which the phrases course and flow through into the mind, detonating little bombs of pleasure. Here’s the opening of one of his dialect poems, Violets.
Sister, tha knows while we was on th’ planks
Aside o’ t’ grave, an’ th’ coffin set
On th’ yaller clay, wi’ th’ white flowers top of it
Waitin’ ter be buried out o’ th’ wet?
An’ t’ parson makin’ haste, an’ a’ t’ black
Huddlin’ up i’ t’ rain,
Did t’ ’appen ter notice a bit of a lass away back
Hoverin’, lookin’ poor an’ plain?
— How should I be lookin’ round!
An’ me standin’ there on th’ plank,
An’ our Ted’s coffin set on th’ ground,
Waitin’ to be sank!
In my opinion, the effort required in deciphering Lawrence’s dialect poems completely prevents the speed and leaping-out quality I’ve described. (The same goes for the dialect poetry of one of his heroes, Robbie Burns, which I’ve never related to.) They leave me completely cold. If I’m going to decipher something before I really understand it, I’d rather spend my time on Anglo-Saxon or Middle English poetry.
Transitional: The Hands of The Betrothed
Here he is writing in standard English, and in four-square quatrains (stanzas of four lines, rhyming a, b, a, b). The thing I notice about this poem are the cramped contrivance of the rhymes (‘heart is / mart is’). But I suppose more obvious is its smutty subject matter (her hand resting on his knee, then sinking into his flesh and bone and ‘foraging’ him – does he mean she was rummaging in his trousers?)
Her tawny eyes are onyx of thoughtlessness,
Hardened they are like gems in time-long prudery;
Yea, and her mouth’s prudent and crude caress
Means even less than her many words to me.
Except her kiss betrays me this, this only
Consolation, that in her lips her blood at climax clips
Two hard, crude paws in hunger on the lonely
Fruit of my heart, ere down, rebuked, it slips.
I know from her hardened lips that still her heart is
Hungry for love, yet if I lay my hand in her breast
She puts me away, like a saleswoman whose mart is
Endangered by the pilferer on his quest.
Though her hands are still the woman, her large, strong hands
Heavier than mine, yet like leverets caught in steel
When I hold them; my spent soul understands
Their dumb confession of what her blood must feel.
For never her hands come nigh me but they lift
Like heavy birds from the morning stubble, to settle
Upon me like sleeping birds, like birds that shift
Uneasily in their sleep, disturbing my mettle.
How caressingly she lays her hand on my knee!
How strangely she tries to disown it, as it sinks
In my flesh and bone, and forages into me!
How it stirs like a subtle stoat, whatever she thinks!
And often I see her clench her fingers tight
And thrust her fists suppressed in the folds of her skirt;
And sometimes, how she grasps her arms with her bright
Big hands, as if surely her arms did hurt.
And I have seen her stand all unaware
Pressing her spread hands over her breasts, as she
Would crush their mounds on her heart, to kill in there
The pain that is her simple ache for me.
She makes her hands take my part, the part of a man
To her; she crushes them into her bosom deep
Where I should lie, and with her own strong span
Closes her arms, that should fold on me in sleep.
Ah, and she puts her hands upon the wall,
Presses them there, and kisses her big dark hands,
Then lets her black hair loose, the darkness fall
About her from her maiden-folded bands.
And sits in her own dark night of her bitter hair
Dreaming — God knows of what, for to me she’s the same
Betrothed young lady who loves me, and takes good care
Of her maidenly virtue and of my good name.
This poem displays several other Lawrence qualities. For a start it’s too long to be a simple lyric, in fact it feels too long, full stop. But as it goes on you become aware of one of Lawrence’s central characteristics, which is his relentlessness. He won’t stop. He has got an idea and is going to approaches it from different angles, again and again, relentlessly describing it. He doesn’t let the reader off the hook. This was an enduring characteristic through his career, of both the prose and poetry. His best animal poems are great but almost all too long.
And the third thing is the uncompromising honesty of the content. Lots of people who don’t know much about poetry associate it with rarefied and lovely sentiments expressed in elegant or shapely phrases. As you can see, Lawrence is having none of this. He is going to bluntly tell you the unvarnished truth in its entirety, whether or not it breaches conventions of good manners and etiquette and politeness. I smiled at the description of the beloved’s ‘large, strong hands/Heavier than mine’.
Another thing going on here is connected to the contrived and dodgy rhymes, which is the strong sense that he is trying to break free of the constraint of traditional structures. The power of the thought continually stretches the structure, straining it at the seams, making the rhymes creak to contain them. How long, you wonder, will he put up with being constricted by traditional late-Victorian poetic convention?
Plus, as Sagar bluntly puts it, he wasn’t so great at the traditional thing, anyway:
Lawrence’s instinct, at this stage of his career, worked fitfully, and there was little craftsmanship to fall back on. He had no ear for formal rhythm or rhyme, and when he attempted them was usually inept.
Liberation: Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923)
Sagar thinks Lawrence came of age in his verse when he did as a person i.e. when he eloped with another man’s wife, Frieda von Richthofen, at the end of 1912. The emotional completion, turmoil, anguish this caused is recorded in his collection Look! We have come through! published in 1917.
But I don’t agree. The Look! poems have shed some of the Victorian inheritance but not enough. And we know it’s not enough when we compare any of them with any of the poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, which represent the discovery of a completely new world or worlds. So instead of citing something from Look! We have come through! I’ll skip straight to the beasts. Take the sequence of poems about tortoises which are something utterly new. Here’s the start of Tortoise Shout.
I thought he was dumb,
I said he was dumb,
Yet I’ve heard him cry.
First faint scream,
Out of life’s unfathomable dawn,
Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon’s dawning rim,
Far, far off, far scream.
Tortoise in extremis.
This is from a new planet. It’s the result of two things, two breakthroughs. In Look! We have come through! he describes the intense emotions of his stormy relationship with Fried with what feels like great honesty and candour – fine, good, well done. But oh my God the tedium of yet another book of poems about the problems of love, love love love. And some of the phraseology, and some of the thinking, the conceptualisation, still feels lamely Victorian, reflected in the persistence of rhymes, sometimes very contrived rhymes. Here’s the start of one of the memorable ones (because it has boobs in it), Song of a Man Who is Loved:
Between her breasts is my home, between her breasts.
Three sides set on me space and fear, but the fourth side rests
Sure and a tower of strength, ’twixt the walls of her breasts.
Having known the world so long, I have never confessed
How it impresses me, how hard and compressed
Rocks seem, and earth, and air uneasy, and waters still ebbing west.
All things on the move, going their own little ways, and all
Jostling, people touching and talking and making small
Contacts and bouncing off again, bounce! bounce like a ball!
Sensitive readers, men or women, may thrill to the envisioning of boobs and their psychological comfort, from each sex’s point of view. Fine. What strikes me is the dullness that results from having to repeat the rhyme three times in each stanza! The sense that he chooses an end rhyme in the first line of each stanza and then the meaning has to be twisted and bent to fit whatever two words he can find to rhyme with it for the end of the succeeding two lines. Contorted and contrived.
Compare and contrast this with the total breakthrough of Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Now not only are there the long lines of free verse, but his entire conceptualisation of what a poem can be has been smashed to pieces. It doesn’t have to labour over a sequence of well-worked conceits: it can fly free. It can be fantastical. It can be so elliptical it has little at first sight to do with the subject. Or to put it another way, he can have one wild elliptical insight, throw out an oblique conceit, and then run with it. Thus ‘Humming Bird‘. Thus the brilliance of setting his poem about humming birds in the prehistoric world.
I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.
Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.
The Look! poems are boring because they’re about tortured relations between a man and woman (yawn), the threadbare subject of so many poems for such a long time, for literally thousands of years. But seeing a humming bird as a window into the Mesozoic era? How many poems have been written on this subject, anywhere, in any culture, in all human history? None. It is something completely new, something wild.
I believe there were no flowers, then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.
Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,
Luckily for us.
Real genius – both for the flash of insight, the conceit, the idea – and then not restricting the insight in laboured rhymes but letting it express itself in free verse, each line as long as it needs to be to make its point.
Witty conceit: Mosquito
As to form, Lawrence persists with quatrains because they’re always handy. But you can also just have a phrase and that’s it. You don’t need to slave away at a four-line quatrain with studied rhymes working through a full description of the thing in question. Instead, you’re free to deploy quick stabs, throwaway but inspired images, which give you a sense of huge imaginative power and confidence. Thus the brilliant opening of The Mosquito.
When did you start your tricks,
Monsieur?
What a brilliant conceit, to address the tiny buzzing insect formally, but with the formality of another language as there are no mosquitoes in England. French because it instantly creates a sense of droll Parisian courtesy, think of Poirot politely skewering his victims, with just one word – Monsieur – given a line to itself, conjuring Parisian wit and style. And it’s funny. What lovely humour.
When did you start your tricks,
Monsieur?
What do you stand on such high legs for?
Why this length of shredded shank,
You exaltation?
Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards
And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,
Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?
Note the way the direct address continues – Monsieur is echoed by ‘You exaltation’ and ‘You phantom’. The lovely light and airy sense of humour continues in this sly stanza.
I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory
In sluggish Venice.
You turn your head towards your tail, and smile.
‘Sluggish Venice’ – how Lawrence is not surrendering to the middle-class groupthink about that smelly polluted mausoleum! How his tiny mosquito hears a posh woman make a clever comparison, but just turns and smiles. Mosquito just smiles at ladies who lunch. So many dynamics in just three lines! Thomas Hardy was still alive when ‘Mosquito’ was published (he didn’t die till 1928) but this is from another universe than Hardy’s gloomy, rhymey Victorian gravestones.
So it is that around page 80 of this 250-page selection we finally hit pay-dirt. The poems that came before this breakthrough, Sagar may justify with this or that scholarly explanation, but Birds, Beasts and Flowers is a wormhole into a different dimension, an entirely new way of thinking about what a poem can be.
Lawrence and Ted Hughes: Fish
And in a flash I realised where Ted Hughes gets so much of his supernatural animal poetry from. Compare and contrast Lawrence’s poem about a fish with Hughes’s famous poem about a pike. Here’s Lawrence in 1922:
I have waited with a long rod
And suddenly pulled a gold-and-greenish, lucent fish from below,
And had him fly like a halo round my head,
Lunging in the air on the line.
Unhooked his gorping, water-horny mouth.
And seen his horror-tilted eye,
His red-gold, water-precious, mirror-flat bright eye;
And felt him beat in my hand, with his mucous, leaping life-throb.
And my heart accused itself
Thinking: I am not the measure of creation.
This is beyond me, this fish.
His God stands outside my God.
And the gold-and-green pure lacquer-mucus comes off in my hand,
And the red-gold mirror-eye stares and dies,
And the water-suave contour dims.
But not before I have had to know
He was born in front of my sunrise.
Before my day.
He outstarts me.
And I, a many-fingered horror of daylight to him,
Have made him die.
And the Ted Hughes in 1960:
A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them –
Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond…
Obviously the phrasing is different, Lawrence is more obsessed with himself, Hughes is more objective, and they’re both mighty works. But they have a very similar feel for the otherness of the cold underwater world. And they’re both in quatrains – no longer restricted by metre or rhymes, but there’s something about the four-line stanza which is enduringly useful.
Brushstrokes: Eagle In New Mexico
It’s not just that he’s broken free of the need for regular lines with a fixed metre i.e. the same number of beats in each line (tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum) or the use of lines of alternating beats. It’s not just that he’s adopted the freedom of having some lines of exorbitant length, 20, 30, 40 words, more like paragraphs than lines, contrasted with some lines of just one word. That’s all a big shift, a massive break.
But the fundamental change is a complete and drastic change in the concept of what a poem is. No longer do the words serve the dictates of the form i.e. you need rhyme words, and a particular number of beats in specific lines. No longer are the words subordinate to the rhyme scheme and stanza structure.
And once you’ve flown free of those restrictions, instead of the words being subordinate to the requirements of the form, it’s the words, and the requirements of each phrase, which dictate the form. Each little bloc of lines or each individual line can become as purely expressive as you want. Unrestricted by those constraints, the words, and lines, can become purely expressive. Like brushstrokes. It becomes word painting. There are lots of examples in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Here’s a section of Eagle In New Mexico which particularly demonstrates what I mean, made up of a series of short brushstrokes.
Sun-breaster,
Staring two ways at once, to right and left;
Masked-one
Dark-visaged
Sickle-masked
With iron between your two eyes;
You feather-gloved
To the feet;
Foot-fierce;
Erect one;
The god-thrust entering you steadily from below.
No rhyme, no regular scansion (number of beats) just word painting. Obviously the use of short two- or three-word phrases creates a structure of its own, in this little section. But you see how the words don’t have to comply with any rules but are as free as individual brushstrokes on a painting, as visible, as prominent as the brushstrokes on Cézanne or Van Gogh.
The Poetry of the Present
Lawrence himself describes the effect in an essay, The Poetry of the Present, which was published as a preface to the American edition of his New Poems (1920). It’s so important I’m going to quote it at length:
Free verse is, or should be direct utterance from the instant, whole man. It is the soul and the mind and body surging at once, nothing left out.
They speak all together. There is some confusion, some discord. But the confusion and the discord only belong to the reality, as noise belongs to the plunge of water.
It is no use inventing fancy laws for free verse, no use drawing a melodic line which all the feet must toe. Free verse toes no melodic line, no matter what drill-sergeant.
Whitman pruned away his clichés – perhaps his clichés of rhythm as well as of phrase. And this is about all we can do, deliberately, with free verse. We can get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound or sense. We can break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to force our utterance. We can break the stiff neck of habit.
We can be in ourselves spontaneous and flexible as flame, we can see that utterance rushes out without artificial foam or artificial smoothness.
The past and the future are the two great bournes of human emotion, the two great homes of the human days, the two eternities. They are both conclusive, final. Their beauty is the beauty of the goal, finished, perfected. Finished beauty and measured symmetry belong to the stable, unchanging eternities. But in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment.
Free verse has its own nature… is neither star nor pearl, but instantaneous like plasm. It has no goal in either eternity. It has no finish. It has no satisfying stability, satisfying to those who like the immutable. None of this. It is the instant; the quick; the very jetting source of all will-be and has-been. The utterance is like a spasm, naked contact with all influences at once. It does not want to get anywhere. It just takes place.
Whitman
Note the references to the American poet, Walt Whitman (1819 to 1892). I don’t know a lot about Whitman, just the general idea that he popularised free verse in English and associated it with the democratic freedom of the United States.
Lawrence has obviously swallowed Whitman whole. He namechecks him a couple of times in actual poems, notably in the poem about the dog, Bibbles. If you turn to his prose, you discover that Lawrence wrote a chapter-length essay about Whitman which he included in ‘Studies in Classic American Literature’, but his name also crops up in a number of other essays about poetry. Whitman was a pioneer of free verse, he made the big heave, he broke the chains.
Declarative: Cypresses
And not only this, not being constrained by structure, form, rhyme schemes and whatnot means Lawrence can spit it out. If there’s a concept or idea behind the poem, he can just state it straight out. The poems become more declarative. Take the brilliant poem Cypresses, the idea is that the tall, dark cypress trees growing in clumps in northern Italy, symbolise the lost civilisation of the Etruscans and in some sense keep their secrets. Rather than dress this idea up in metaphor and crabbed metre and the requirements of rhyme, he can address it as he likes, still in a fanciful mode, still fancifully skipping round the idea, but with much more freedom
Folded in like a dark thought
For which the language is lost,
Tuscan cypresses,
Is there a great secret?
Are our words no good?
The undeliverable secret,
Dead with a dead race and a dead speech, and yet
Darkly monumental in you,
Etruscan cypresses.
A symptom of this is the freedom to drop into almost prose speech, to use known phrases and proverbs from prose or speech, unconstrained by metre, falling as naturally as in speech.
They say the fit survive,
But I invoke the spirits of the lost.
Those that have not survived, the darkly lost,
To bring their meaning back into life again,
Which they have taken away
And wrapt inviolable in soft cypress-trees,
Etruscan cypresses.
You see it even more (the use of quite prosey, everyday proverbial statements) in the domestic poem about the pet dog, Bibbles, who attached herself to Lawrence in Taos. The poem mocks the dog’s ‘infidelity’, lack of loyalty, always looking for a new lap to snuggle up in.
Not that you’re merely a softy, oh dear me no.
You know which side your bread is buttered.
You don’t care a rap for anybody.
But you love lying warm between warm human thighs, indiscriminate,
And you love to make somebody love you, indiscriminate,
You love to lap up affection, to wallow in it,
And then turn tail to the next comer, for a new dollop.
And start prancing and licking and cuddling again, indiscriminate.
Oh yes, I know your little game.
See how the deployment of so many homely phrases (‘dear me no’, ‘your little game’), the common vocabulary (a ‘dollop’) are all chosen to indicate the homely, cosy, domestic atmosphere of Lawrence’s attitude towards his little pet dog.
Animal lectures
In case it’s not obvious, many of Lawrence’s best poems are the animal poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. I’ve mentioned Ted Hughes. Lawrence has something very like Hughes’s breath-taking ability to inhabit animals, to make us see the animal and see the world from the animal’s point of view. He is Hughes’s godfather. It feels like he invented an entire new perspective and technique, which Hughes then went on to purify and supercharge.
Many of Lawrence’s animal moments are astonishing but there’s generally something else mixed in with it, which is his discursive aspect. As well as describing the animal and getting into its soul, Lawrence very often gets into its character by making a point, by attributing to it an idea. Often the idea starts out feeling random or irrelevant and only slowly do you come round to realising how it’s an angle, a chink a way to get into the subject.
But the ideas sometimes come to dominate, become explicit, become pedagogic. Take the emergence of his strong anti-Roman animus in Cypresses, a verse equivalent of the anti-Roman sentiments found throughout his book on the Etruscans, Etruscan Places. Or the long poem Elephant, which has lots of lovely descriptions of elephants but is really about the visit of the Prince of Wales to Ceylon.
Take his hatred of traffic pollution as expressed in In The City, his ridiculing of modern science in Anaxagoras. More typically Lawrentian is the kvetching about sex in Tortoise Shout or the anti-human polemic of Mountain Lion, which describes the gap between man and nature which recurs in many of the poems. Not always but very often he’s making a point over and above the marvellous animal-inhabiting. The lecturer, the pedagogue. it gives them an energy, but personally, I feel they detract from the purity of the effect.
Diversifying: Pansies
In 1929 he published a volume of shorter poems which he called Pansies. The idea is they encapsulate an idea in a pithy way. He explained himself in an introduction:
These poems are called ‘Pansies’ because they are rather ‘Pensées’ than anything else. Pascal or La Bruyère wrote their ‘Pensées’ in prose, but it has always seemed to me that a real thought, a single thought, not an argument, can only exist easily in verse, or in some poetic form. There is a didactic element about prose thoughts which makes them repellent, slightly bullying…
Back in 1915 Lawrence had been included in Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology. The general idea was to produce very short poems which used free verse, non-rhyme, visual elements like indentation, common speech rhythms, to produce hard, clear ‘images’. Some of the Pansies seem like a kind of reversion to that earlier mode, the short ones like Lizard.
Lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening
no doubt to the sound of the spheres.
And what a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you
and swirl of a tail!
If men were as much men as lizards are lizards
they’d be worth looking at.
The brevity and the sting in the tail reminded me of the epigrams of the Roman poet Martial, which I’ve reviewed. In my review I cite the Academy of American Poets’ definition of an epigram: ‘An epigram is a short, pithy saying, usually in verse, often with a quick, satirical twist at the end. The subject is usually a single thought or event’ so I wondered what the difference is between an epigram and Lawrence’s pansies.
One thing is for sure, that they allow the lecturer, the preacher, the pedagogue in Lawrence to come out into plain sight.
To make self-preservation and self-protection the first law of existence
Is about as scientific as making suicide the first law of existence,
And amounts to very much the same thing.
At moments like these he comes close to sounding like Exasperated of Tunbridge Wells.
Lecturing: A Sane Revolution
The key point about the Pansies is that they’re not all the pithy little Imagist gems I was imagining. Quite a few of them ramble on. They really are just excuses for lecturing. Here’s one in full to give you the flavour. The thought is nice, but the striking thing is the lack of artistic mediation. It’s perilously close to a bloke at a party getting you into a corner and letting rip with his hobby horse.
If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don’t make it in ghastly seriousness,
don’t do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.
Don’t do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.
Don’t do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.
Don’t do it for equality,
do it because we’ve got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.
Don’t do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.
Don’t do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
Let’s abolish labour, let’s have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it’s not labour.
Let’s have it so! Let’s make a revolution for fun!
Note how run-on lines no longer start with capitals, the kind of complete informality which e.e. cummings developed earlier in the decade. On the whole I didn’t like them, the Pansies. Many are worthy but boring, like We Are Transmitters. Fine sentiments, very quotable but fireless. The volume contains a few animal poems like the Swan series and I liked these. Not so much the lectures.
Last poems: Death and God
The poems of his last years, 1929 and 1930 (he died on 2 March 1930) are obsessed with death, death and religion, obviously not the Christian religion, his own ideas of what a religion should be, poems with titles like We Die Together, The Gods! The Gods!, Name the Gods!, There Are No Gods, God is Born, Lucifer. You get the picture. It’s a shame that, as he entered the final stage of his illness, so many of Lawrence’s poems reverted to Christian motifs. Now admittedly he only mentions all of these Christian stories in order to undermine and reject them, to replace them with his belief in life, the force of life and nature. But the real breaking-free would be not to have mentioned them at all but to have used other imagery.
Still, maybe he was exhausted by illness and the miasma of death around him, as the doctors prognosticated and he was moved to a hospice for the dying and reaching the end of his tether, as described in Shadow:
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life…
Maybe it was just less effort, for a man exhausted by a terminal illness, to revert to the imagery of the Christian chapel and church of his boyhood. Hence a poem as Christian-based as the Lord’s Prayer. I recognise that it moves, after a few gestures towards the Christian prayer, away from Christianity and towards the natural world – but I prefer him when he doesn’t need the Christian props but simply rejoices in his natural milieu, in his own values and insights, above all celebrating the world of flowers, which he knew so much about. For example, ‘Gladness of Death’.
I have always wanted to be as the flowers are
so unhampered in their living and dying,
and in death I believe I shall be as the flowers are.
I shall blossom like a dark pansy, and be delighted
there among the dark sun-rays of death.
Last lectures
These last poems are better than the Pansies but not as good as the Birds and Beasts. Those were pure whereas Lawrence’s last poems have the voice of the lecturer firmly at their core, lecturing and hectoring. He is angry that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned (1928), that the exhibition of his paintings was raided by the police (1929), that his religious poems are called blasphemous – and so writes a series of poems mocking the English and their oh-so-nice bourgeois hypocrisy.
But none of them really rise to the occasion and the occasion is newspapers and bitterness, like his bitterness about the despoliation of England by industrialisation, and the destruction of cities and towns by traffic pollution (‘In The Cities’).
All this desperate last-minute lecturing about the importance of living feels hurried. It lacks the blithe freedom of the eagle in the desert, the mating tortoises, the snake at the water trough, from earlier in the decade. Although there are still sudden patches of florescence, lines which leap out.
There is no god
apart from the poppies and the flying fish,
men singing songs, and women brushing their hair in the sun.
And at the end he celebrates peace, rest after stormy seas.
All that matters is to be at one with the living God
to be a creature in the house of the God of Life.
Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace
and at one with the master of the house, with the mistress,
at home, at home in the house of the living,
sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the fire.
Sleeping on the hearth of the living world
yawning at home before the fire of life
feeling the presence of the living God
like a great reassurance
a deep calm in the heart
a presence
as of the master sitting at the board
in his own and greater being,
in the house of life.
At which point it has almost ceased to be poetry and become prayer. It’s better by far than his satire on the Lord’s Prayer, because purely his own thing and vision from start to finish. And there are the two poems which both use the phrase ‘Life is for delight and bliss’ (‘Anaxagoras’ and ‘Kissing and Horrid Strife’), the method of repetition he used from the start of his career.
Long or short
In his introduction to the Penguin selection, Keith Sagar mentions an important fact. In 1928 an edition of Lawrence’s Collected Poems was published and he put in a lot of effort into correcting, tweaking and, in some cases, rewriting a lot of them. Sagar has taken the decision not to use the revised 1928 versions but in every instance to use the versions as first published.
Does this explain why a lot of his poems, when I look them up online, are drastically shorter than Sagar’s book versions? For example, the online version of Kangaroo clocks in at 45 lines while Sagar’s version has 50. Did Lawrence shorten them when he revised them? Or did the owners of the poetry website trim it? Needs someone with more time and scholarship than I have to clarify.
Credit
‘Selected Poetry of D.H. Lawrence’ edited by Keith Sagar was first published by Penguin Books in 1972. Page references are to the 1986 revised Penguin paperback edition.
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