1D. H. Lawrence moved freely throughout his life from one to the other of three genres: narrative fiction, essays (anticipated or echoed in much of his correspondence), and poems, including his earliest as well as his last and posthumously published writings. Two postulates are implicit in the title of this essay. One is that for Lawrence those distinct genres are interactive, each in its own way exploring the same experience and proceeding from the same creative process. The second is that poetry, though as a whole and in spite of some remarkable exceptions it forms no part of what is best and most valuable in his work, occupies a central position as the record of the moments of imaginative intuition.
2Lawrence’s first published poems appeared, just preceding a contribution from an old hand, John Galsworthy, in the November 1909 issue of the well-established English Review, then under the editorship of Ford Madox Hueffer (who later took the name of Ford Madox Ford). Other poems of his (as well as a short story) were included in the April and October 1910 numbers of the same review. He was thus introduced as a gifted beginner into the London literary milieu. There he made the acquaintance of an excentric and pushing young American poet named Ezra Pound, who had arrived in England in 1908, and was soon to revolutionize or at least disturb the literary scene as the spokesman for the movement known and publicized as Imagism. In his circle, Lawrence met Hilda Doolittle and Richard Aldington, and later Amy Lowell, who gave him friendly support all through the war years.
3There was at the beginning of the century, among the poets of the younger generation, a reaction against what advertised itself as being by right the ‘Georgian poetry’, and appeared to them to follow indolently the post-romantic tradition of fluently descriptive and emotionally meditative verse. Some of them turned back to values attributed to classicism and opposed to looseness of form and individualist humanism, as in the case of T. E. Hulme, the founder of The Poet’s Club, which Pound joined in 1909. But they were also open to new influences. Both Hulme and Pound admired the Japanese haiku for its concise transmission of direct sensation, and they were particularly stimulated by the example of the French Symbolist movement. Pound himself in 1912, in the new-born and Chicago-based periodical Poetry, insisted that the goals of the new poetry were similar to those of ‘Mallarmé and his followers’, and that ‘all the important work of the last twenty-five years had been done in Paris’. The vagueness of the formulation, however, suggests that Symbolism was not easy to define as theory and practice. Arthur Symons, in his influential study The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), had in fact made a distinction between two different tendencies, though both originated in Baudelaire, the precursor. One, represented by Stéphane Mallarmé, aimed at compactness in the poem seen as an artifact, and Symons quoted (in his own translation) Mallarmé’s statement about pure poetry which ‘implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet who yields place to the words’ and dispenses with the ‘lyric afflatus’. The other tendency included Rimbaud and was best exemplified by Jules Laforgue, who adopted a personal tone between derision and despair in his Complaintes, and used the vers libre for a whimsical adaptation of everyday language. The latter influence is clearly felt in a poem like The Waste Land, though T. S. Eliot, in the Introduction to his Selected Poems of Ezra Pound in 1928, while paying tribute to Laforgue’s technical innovations, underplays the foreign influence on Pound’s poetry and his own, and emphasizes the return to the native tradition of blank verse.
- 1 On Imagism, see: Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); J. B. (...)
4The term ‘Imagism’1 was used for the first time in 1912 by Pound (in relation to poems by Hulme), and in the March 1913 issue of Poetry a brief note by F. S. Flint with a commentary by Pound attempted to provide, if not a manifesto, at least a list of the three principles held by the movement:’ 1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’, whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of metronome’. Further down, the ‘Image’ was defined as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’. The insistence that the image must be distinct and clear does not impose a purely objective treatment, but the image must be suggestive in itself, not exploited through the pathetic fallacy which is assumed to be the besetting sin of romanticism.
5Such a program was clearly intended to be federative, not dogmatically exclusive. Even the cautious invitation to the vers libre is qualified by a note indicating that it can itself be prolix and flaccid, so that what is ditched is just the long flogged and now dead horse of what Pound elsewhere calls the hateful ‘ti-TUM ti-TUM’ of traditional prosody. In fact, Imagism soon branched off in different directions. Pound himself in 1914 helped to found Blast, a short-lived periodical used as a tribune to defend the ‘Vorticism’ of his friend Wyndham Lewis, who objected to the presentation of an image frozen in the instant instead of seized at the centre of its emergence, and was soon to become the chief crusader in England for Marinetti’s ‘Futurism’, which Lawrence discovered on his own some time later.
- 2 Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern, 1963; in University Paperbacks, London: Methuen, 1965, (...)
6Appraising the significance of Imagism, Stephen Spender suggested in 1963 that the imagists, as they ‘stripped poetry back to the primitive situation in which the outer experience . . . strikes off an image like a spark,’2 made a new start by supporting ‘the struggle of the Modern’ to return to the source of poetic inspiration, thus giving public expression to the spirit of the new age. One of Joyce’s poems was included in their anthology Des Imagistes of 1914, but what really matters is that their views are in harmony with the theory, still buried in the unpublished Stephen Hero, of the esthetic ‘epiphany’ as the instant and evanescent manifestation of even ‘the commonest object’ as an integral ‘thing’, in its distinct identity (or ‘whatness’). And what they perceive in the ‘image’ is close to that ‘individually distinctive’ form revealing the uniqueness of the natural object for which G. M. Hopkins had coined the word ‘inscape’. Hopkins himself was an early Modern, forced by his alien surroundings (both among the Jesuits and in the literary world) to reconsider the current modes of expression, and, in that sense, his situation as a poet was similar to that of Lawrence later. Stephen Spender, in a paradoxical but suggestive way, associates them as ‘organic’ poets, for whom ‘poetry is the result of the fusion of external experience acting directly upon [their] sensibility’, producing an immediate reaction, which does not develop around and about the image, but is integrated into it and directly conveyed. From that common ground, their antithetic views on poetic form as well as on nature and human life take them into opposite directions, but each contributes by contradistinction to define what the other is about.
- 3 The page references given between square brackets for DHL’s poetry and some of his prose (prefaces, (...)
7After 1909, many of Lawrence’s poems appeared in the traditionalist periodicals. ‘Snap-Dragon’, which is part of the ‘Miriam’ series, was published in the English Review in 1913 (122–26),3 and reprinted in Georgian Poetry 1911–12. Another poem, originally published in 1913 as ‘Cruelty and Love’ in his first volume of collected poetry, Love Poems and Others, was reprinted in Georgian Poetry 1913–15 (42–3) under the title of ‘Love on the Farm’. After 1914, however, some of his poems also appeared in the Imagist reviews and anthologies (Poetry, The Egoist, Some Imagist Poems). Such eclecticism was forced upon him, anyway, when his fiction was outlawed by the publishers after the banning of The Rainbow in 1915, and poetry became his only means of subsistence. It does not follow that he was indifferent to the debate around him. But he viewed some aspects of it with amused detachment. He refused to be dogmatic on the questions of poetic form, including the vers libre, and the image was important to him less as a word-picture than for its value as a symbol. Imagism helped him to move away from (or transform in his revisions) the sentimental atmosphere and the emotional nature-poetry of his early poems, but it does not compare in importance with his discovery of Futurism and, more importantly, of Walt Whitman a few years later.
8When Lawrence prepared the edition of his Collected Poems published in 1928, he revised the material and distributed it between two volumes, under the titles of ‘Rhyming Poems’ for the first and of ‘Unrhyming Poems’ for the second. The titles, however, are misleading, for in the poems of the first volume the rhymes are often sporadic and in some cases altogether missing, and there are some loosely rhyming poems in the second volume. Lawrence, in his prefatory Note to The Collected Poems (27–9) indicates that his purpose was to follow ‘as far as possible’ the chronological order in which the poems had been written, and that the great divide between the two volumes was the personal crisis of 1912 which had started a new life for him with Frieda, and a new poetic cycle.
9The first volume thus includes a large group of ‘subjective’ poems about love (the earliest involving ‘Miriam’, the fictional character standing for Jessie Chambers), and death (his mother’s), which come out of his emotional inner life, from the same roots as his novels. One of the best known, ‘Snap-dragon’, with the girl half-recognizing and mutely denying the sexual challenge of the flower forced open, is the germ of a scene in Sons and Lovers. ‘Love on the Farm’, with the woman caught in the snare of terrified and swooning complicity with her man, the rabbit-killer, anticipates the ending of the chapter ‘Rabbit’ in Women in Love, where the link between Gerald and Gudrun, however, is the mutual challenge to establish a deep blood relationship. The ‘schoolmaster’ series of poems, written when Lawrence was a teacher at Croydon (1909–12), also reflect his experience, and in particular his doubts about the enforcement of mental discipline on spontaneous and even wild young life. In that field too, his personal reactions were later diffracted into the dramatic and essentially dialogic substance of the novels. The topic of education, in the chapter ‘Class-room’ of Women in Love, is not merely discussed between Birkin and Hermione, but also reveals and fuels the vital conflict between them. The volume also includes a few narrative poems that Lawrence, in his prefatory Note, calls ‘fictional’, some of them making use of the dialect, and ends with some poems of a later date about the War.
10Lawrence warns his reader that ‘many poems are changed, some entirely rewritten’, but that his goal had not been to improve their form. He came to realise that in his immaturity he had been too timid and respectful of the conventions of feeling, and he now wanted to give voice to the ‘demon’ he had then tried to stifle. In a more extended Foreword of the same year 1928 (849–52), not used at the time and only published posthumously in Phoenix, he says of the opening poem in the first volume: ‘The Wild Common (33–4) was very early and very confused. I have re-written some of it, and added some, till it seems complete. It has taken me twenty years to say what I started to say, incoherently, when I was nineteen, in this poem. . . . 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’. A comparison with the original version (894) of the poem mentioned, in which a young man, another Narcissus, watches his image, his ‘shadow quivering to and fro’ on the surface of a pond, shows that the revisions serve to proclaim the triumph of life over the passing of time proclaimed in the persistent screaming of the peewits, and to exorcize the earlier fear of dissolution in the flux, transforming the ‘shadow’ enfolded by the water into ‘substance’: for ‘All that is right, all that is good, all that is God takes substance’. The doubts are overcome rather than just set aside for a time as in the first version. But the new explicitness is not a clear poetic gain, for the demon in Lawrence (as Ursula also says to and about Birkin in Women in Love) is liable to turn preacher.
11The second volume of his Collected Poems includes Look! We Have Come Through!, a ‘cycle of love poems’ (published in 1917), and Birds, Beasts and Flowers (of 1923), as well as some poems which had appeared separately in periodicals. In a letter (of 19 November 1913) to Edward Marsh, the editor at that date of Georgian Poetry, Lawrence had responded to critical remarks concerning two poems dating from the days in the Alps with Frieda, which were for him the beginning of a new life. It appears that rhyme remains an option, though it is no longer a law. He uses it as indissoluble from the form chosen in ‘Ballad of a Wilful Woman’, with a relaxed abcb scheme on a 3333 metre (200–03). He also defends its accidental occurrence in the basically unrhymed ‘Roses on the Breakfast Table’ (217–18):
‘why need you notice they are rhymes?—You are a bit of a policeman in poetry. I never put them in because they are rhymes’. What really matters for him is the rhythm and the music of the verse. ‘I think I read my poetry more by length than by stress—as a matter of movements in space than footsteps hitting the earth. . . . I think more of a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air, than anything, when I think of metre. . . . It all depends on the pause—the natural pause, the lingering of the voice according to the feeling—it is the hidden emotional pattern that makes poetry, not the obvious form’.
12To make his point clear, he provides a ‘reading’ of part of his own poem (in a version different from the published one) and of Ernest Dowson’s often-anthologized poem of the Nineties, Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae, which, he says, makes him feel like indulging in ‘the luxury of tears’. He resorts for his scanning of the verse to the classical marks for long or short, not to the marks / x for stressed / unstressed syllables, and dispenses with the division into feet, so that the rhythm is not analysed as the regular return of strong syllables, but as a freely flowing and undulating movement, with the so-called ‘stress’ creating an effect not of weight, but of rising intonation. We may note here that G. M. Hopkins, who had felt the same need to get rid of the conventional rhythmic patterns, had taken the opposite way, using a verse form characterised (even when it is not technically ‘sprung rhythm’) by a dense pattern of stresses reinforced by alliteration and consonance. Lawrence is more conservative, claiming for no more than a free use of the traditional poetic licences (mostly anapaests substituted for iambs), and adhering to a typically post-romantic conception of the music of poetry.
13He goes further, however, in ‘Poetry of the Present’ (181–86), an essay which appeared as the Introduction to the American edition of his New Poems in 1918, but, he says, ‘should have come as a preface to Look! We Have Come Through!’. Here, poetic form is made to differ according to different modes of inspiration. The title of the essay is deliberately ambivalent, but it is clear from the start that poetry can only aspire to be ‘of the present’ in the sense of ‘Modern’ if it attempts to convey the experience of ‘the immediate present’. Lawrence acknowledges the value of another kind of poetry which surveys the completeness and perfection of ‘bygone moments’ and of ‘glimmering futurity’ (‘the two eternities’, ‘the two great bournes of human emotion’), and gives it form and substance through the ‘perfect symmetry’ of a ‘rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance’ and is finally crystallized into ‘gem-like lyrics’ as in Keats or Shelley. And he regrets that all most free-versifiers can do is ‘to break the lovely form of metrical verse, and to dish up the fragments as a new substance called vers libre . . .. They do not know that free verse has its own nature, that it is neither star nor pearl, but instantaneous like plasm’. What it can and must achieve is to awake man’s ‘immediate, instant self’ to the mystery of creation in the ever-present instant, in which life inexhaustibly renews itself.
14Lawrence was probably stimulated by his discovery of Futurism, recorded in a letter to Edward Garnett (3 June 1914), which additionally confirms that poetry and fiction were indissolubly linked in his mind and writing. Defending his novel still in progress and entitled The Wedding Ring, he mentions that he has just read the Futurists (in the 1912 anthology I Poeti Futuristi with Marinetti’s earlier Manifesto prefixed to the volume). It helped him, as he says, ‘to see something of what I am after’, and to realize that ‘somehow, what is physic—non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element—which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent’. What he appreciates in the Futurists is their iconoclastic freedom and their determination to reach beyond the ego to what is ‘inhuman’ in man and woman. What he finds ‘stupid’ is that, in their enthusiasm for modern scientific civilisation, they look forward to the age of the machine, both in life and in the poetry that is intended to reflect it, and interpret life not on the organic, but on the physical-mechanical model (which is what the sculptor Loerke does in Women in Love). It is from that point that his letter proceeds to the often quoted conclusion: ‘You must not look in my novel for the old stable ego—of the character’, but for the passage through ‘allotropic states . . . of the same single radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond—but I say ’diamond, what! This is carbon’. And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon’. The fundamental divergence with Hopkins in his view of the relation of man to Nature is emphasized by their use of the same image. In Hopkins’s poem ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’ (not Lawrence’s immanent flow of continued creation), nature’s ‘clearest-selved spark, Man’ has to be burnt to ashes by ‘world’s wildfire’ to be redeemed and resurrected through the Incarnation as ‘immortal diamond’.
15Lawrence, however, in the essay ‘Poetry of the Present’ quoted earlier, says that he is primarily indebted to Walt Whitman for the discovery of the value of free verse as the ‘clue’ to ‘the incarnate, carnal self’ at ‘the quick of all creation’. This is not inconsistent with the highly critical judgment he had passed on Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923, but begun in 1917). Whitman wrote genuine free verse because he turned to life liberated from all conventions (moral as well as literary) and with all his ‘passional self’. But in inflating his ego to ‘sing himself’ into complete participation in the Whole, he found himself absorbed, losing his individuality, which seems to have ‘all leaked out of [him]’, ‘oozing into the universe’. ‘Everything was female to him’, and he was always ‘wanting to merge himself into the womb of something or other’. This is, at least superficially, in agreement with what T. E. Hulme has said of Whitman (as recorded in Speculations), that he ‘works up emotions not really caused by the objects’ and is thus ‘drowned in self-generated emotions’, a judgment based on the same critical premises as T. S. Eliot’s assertion (in his essay on Hamlet) of the necessity for art to find an ‘objective correlative’ to express emotion. But Lawrence’s criticism of ‘subjective’ poetry goes deeper. Whitman’s failure, which he implicitly connects with his homosexuality, results from the failure to discriminate between the opposed and complementary sexual principles of life. He fell victim to the temptation which Lawrence had just denounced through the voice of Birkin in the still unpublished novel Women in Love, that of merging and fusing one’s identity in Love, which in the case of Whitman expands to become the love of all creation, including all humanity in the pursuit of the democratic illusion, and can only result in the lethal peace of inchoate life before selfhood.
16Lawrence’s poetry is essentially a return, beyond Imagist impressionism and by way of Whitman, to the Romantic tradition of visionary poetry. He does not often refer to the Romantic poets. Shelley is mentioned in ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ as an instance of the pure male spirit, wishing to see the skylark as disembodied beauty and to transcend life instead of being part of it (Phoenix I, 459). But Romanticism has many mansions. Lawrence had been fascinated in his youth by Blake’s poetry. Looking back on his life in 1928, he also ranks Wordsworth’s ‘Ode to Immortality’ and Keats’s Odes among the poems which ‘after all give the ultimate shape to one’s life’, and have been for him second in influence only to the Nonconformist hymns of his childhood (Phoenix II 396). In his view of the ‘poetry of the present’, he shares the conviction expressed by Keats that truth proceeds from direct experience and that ‘axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses’ (in a letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818). He too belongs to the ‘poetical Character’ claimed by Keats as his own, characterized by sympathetic identification, and ‘distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’ (of the kind that Lawrence discussing Whitman defines as ‘Myself’ inflated to reach the state of ‘Allness’). ‘The camelion Poet’ of that type has ‘no self’, ‘no Identity’, because he is continually ‘filling some other body—the sun, the moon, the sea and men and women’ (in a letter to R. Woodhouse, 27 0ctober 1818). Keats had earlier said of himself (in a letter of 22 November 1817) that ‘if a sparrow comes before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel’, defining the kind of empathy that is the starting point for some of the best poems in Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers.
17What is derived from Lawrence’s immediate experience, however, differs from Keats’s intuition of the ultimate identity of truth and beauty. It is much closer to what Wordsworth records in the Prelude, the early ‘dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being’ (I, 392–93) transforming ‘familiar shapes’ into ‘huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men’ (I, 398–99), and later renovated through the ‘visitings of imaginative power’ in ‘pre-eminent’ moments, or ‘spots of time’ (XII, 203–10). Lawrence’s poetry too proceeds from the instant and concrete perception to the ‘sense of unknown modes of being’. But what is revealed to him is radically opposed to Wordsworth’s unifying vision of all the manifestations of Nature as ‘Characters of the great Apocalypse’ and symbols of Eternity, the Book of the Revelation testifying to God’s single design and Providence (VI, 638–39). It is in fact very close to Blake’s gnostic view that life exists in all eternity as the indissoluble union of matter and spirit, of body and soul, and is made up of forever opposed ‘contraries’.
18Lawrence, in his Foreword to Look! We Have Come Through! (191), warns the reader that ‘these poems should not be considered separately, as so many single pieces’, and form ‘an essential story, or history, or confession, unfolding one from the other in organic development’. But they are not arranged into a continuous and coherent narrative. They offer separate images, contemplated in a single vision or shared by two in brief scenes, and reflecting opposite moods, of fulfilment or failure, of content, yearning or anger, with all the intensity of the lived moment. There are some apparent exceptions, and one that looms large is the poem ‘Manifesto’ (262–68). But although it is in some sense narrative, retracing the stages of a man’s life, the view it offers is panoramic, looking forward to the Promised Land and backward on the trials gone through from the Pisgah of the now, of ‘the mystic NOW’ on which the poem opens and concludes, and from which the proclamation is made. And it has the impetus of a Whitmanesque Song of the Self exulting as it stands at last revealed to itself through its harmony with the surrounding and enveloping universe.
19For Lawrence, however, Whitman’s sense of belonging to nature as a whole is a delusion, and harmony is not at-oneness but duality. The climax of his poem (stanzas VI and VII) takes us to the centre of his experience of sex, with its successive moments. There is first a plunge into darkness in which the self seems to disintegrate and be whirled unresisting into annihilation. But when the man’s self is about to overstep the ‘bounds’ that define it as distinct and separate, it becomes ultimately aware that it is not standing on the brink of some void, but encountering another self as the limit that defines him. He may, of course, rush to the crash and accept its dissolution: the death-wish is acknowledged by Lawrence as an integral part of sexuality. But it is the manifestation of the old man that must die in order to be reborn. It leads to the love that is death-in-life and ends in slow self-destruction or suicide (as for Gerald in Women in Love). The individual self may also react against the surrender, kicking itself up, so to speak, to rise again to the light. Then the true ‘I’ is born, accepting to define itself in the self-creative opposition to the ‘not-me’. Love, then, is neither separateness or fusion, but freedom in conjunction with the other, and it can only be made perfect once this experience has been shared. The poem is an essential clue to Women in Love. It would be totally inadequate as a summary of the novel, but it helps the reader to discern more clearly the pattern of the conflicts ending in death or love in which the characters are caught. It is particularly useful as a guideline through the twists and turns and the obscurities of the chapter ‘Excurse’, which ends on Ursula, initiated and consenting at last after failures and resistance, sharing with Birkin the experience which fulfils his desire in fulfilling hers: ‘For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.’
20In Lawrence’s ‘philosophical’ essays, the view of the creative conflict of contraries is expanded into a vision of the universe. The male and female principles (in ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ and in ‘The Crown’) are identified with the streams of light and darkness meeting and clashing, not merely at the origin of life, but in the process of its continued creation, and as the opposed dominant powers in the civilisations of the icy North and the burning South, triumphant and destructive in the two extremes of the mind or the flesh imposing its law on the other. But this sweeping vision formulated through a quasi-Nietzschean recreation and reinterpretation of old myths about the Creation, or the origin of sex, or the twin sources of religion, is also supported and made concrete through a complex network of contrasted images, mostly of flowers and animals. The poppy, when ‘the pollen clashes into the pistil stream’, bursts triumphantly into flower, ‘scarlet and radiant for a little while, immanent on the unknown’ (‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, Phoenix I, 409, 442); but the lotus or the water-lily are just emerged from the primeval mud, turgid and lurid (as they appear to Gudrun at the beginning of the chapter ‘Sketch-Book’ in Women in Love). When man is only concerned with feeding and protecting his ego, he is not the lordly eagle but the vulture, not the lion but the hyaena, not the singing lark but the slinking snake ‘which is the spirit of . . . the festering cold of the marsh’ (‘The Crown’, Phoenix II, 407). But even the vilest creature is not to be dismissed from our view and mind. We must look at them steadily, though tempted to recoil in fear and loathing, because we belong as they do to the womb of darkness whence organic substance, if not quickened into life, must issue forth as a flow of corruption.
21That is why the characteristic figure for Lawrence’s imagery is not the metaphor, which relies on similarity, but the metonymy, based on the recognition of some kind of identity in depth under different ‘names’ or appearances. And the faculty to penetrate intuitively below the surface is the peculiar gift of the poetic imagination, and the origin of what Lawrence calls ‘the poetry of the present’. We find it operating in most of the poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers (published in 1923 and gathered in the section ‘Unrhyming Poems’ of the Collected Poems in 1928). The object of the poem is simultaneously perceived in its concrete form and recognized as a manifestation of universal creation, in sheer organic efflorescence or mindless consciousness.
22In ‘Fish’ (334–40), the observer is fascinated by the shapes and movements of those creatures, each separate and restricted to a strictly biological connection with the others, but ‘enwombed’ in total at-oneness with the liquid element. They are so utterly alien that they defeat any attempt to relate them through metaphor to human existence. They force man to realize that he is not the measure of creation. They belong to another universe, with ‘other Gods’, so that any attempt to seize beyond the images something of their mode of being, of what it is like to be them, can only be the poetic equivalent of negative theology, for which statements about God can only be formulated in terms of what He is not. The poem, hovering round the unattainable unknown, is a difficult exercise, in which Lawrence, as in some other poems of the same sort, is brilliantly half-successful.
23The situation in ‘Snake’ (349–51) is different because the animal is part of the same order of creation as man. But it was incompletely quickened by light into life out of the primeval mud, and so belongs to the underworld of darkness and of the marsh. In a Note prefacing the section ‘Reptiles’ of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, that mythic account of its origin is given in a quotation from John Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy, which itself includes a brief fragment from Herakleitos (Heraclitus) stating that ‘in the tensions of opposites all things have their being’ (348, 993). Lawrence had discovered Burnet’s book with delight in 1916, and used it to reinforce his bestiary in ‘The Reality of Peace’ in 1917. In that essay, though it is briefly suggested that ‘the serpent of living corruption’ might ‘take his place among us honourably’ (Phoenix I, 679), the snake mostly appears as an object of hate and fear. It reminds man that we are created out of the same substance to which we will return through the dissolution of death. And it represents the mindless instinctual life that man is tempted to regress to in pure sensuality or to repress within him in outrage and shame, the two seemingly opposite paths to the same disintegration of human existence leading to putrescence. But at the beginning of the poem the snake appears unexpectedly, in an objective image resulting from an immediate impression, as a distinct creature with a life of its own. The observer confronts it at a distance, without any Whitmanesque urge to rush forward to greet it, for the yellow snake is poisonous, but with respect for the strange and fascinating motions of this visitor emerging from his kingdom of darkness into man’s world between heaven and earth. He resists the social urge within him to kill it, but his final impulse to throw a log at it as it disappears, an attempt to debase and humiliate it, is a deep human reaction, not of hatred for the animal, but of horror at the blackness into which it slithers back and which, for man, is that part of himself from which he recoils.
24Most of the poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers proceed in the same way, with the observer fixing his attention on one or several aspects of an image, and conveying his observations in the tone of familiar conversation with the reader. Though a few poems of that kind are still scattered in the two volumes that followed, most of them are fragments belonging to the minor genres of the essay in verse: the moral epistle for Pansies (1929), a bunch of pensées in the sense of thoughts rather than flowers, and the satire for Nettles (1930).
- 4 Quotations from Etruscan Places (1932) in Penguin Books, 1950 and reprints, 107, 174.
25There is a return to the earlier mode in the last poems found in Lawrence’s papers after his death, but in the best of them the poetry of the present is enlarged to include the past of history and myths and to face the prospect of death. In ‘Bavarian Gentians’ (697, but what is quoted here is part of another version, 960), the darkly luminous flower lights the way for the wedding-guest to the place where Persephone returns every year, and Pluto ‘ravishes her once again and pierces her once more with his passion of the utter dark’, so that she will be impregnated and reborn in the spring. ‘The Ship of Death’ is inspired by ‘the little bronze ship of death’ Lawrence had seen in one of the Etruscan tombs of Cerveteri, which was placed on the death-bed of a chief to ‘bear him over to the other world’: for ‘to the peoples of the great natural religions the after-life was a continuation of the wonder-journey of life.’4 ‘Shadows’ is an act of faith in the everlasting power of Creation, so that, ‘drenched / with the deep oblivion of earth’s lapse and renewal’, ‘I am in the hands of the unknown God, / he is breaking me down to his own oblivion / to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.’
26Lawrence’s poetry, in spite of some remarkable exceptions, is not the most valuable and lasting part of his work. But it occupies a central position in it as the instant record of moments of insight, capturing the sensation, together with the immediate intuition attending it, as it emerges from ‘the quick of life’, and transmitting it in its integrity, both complete and unadulterated. What Lawrence experienced in those moments is then dissociated and reassembled in the essays to form a more or less coherent system of ideas and images. It is dramatized in the much richer world of his narrative fiction, but the novel does not speak in one voice, not even Birkin’s in Women in Love, and still less Cipriano’s in The Plumed Serpent, so that the clues can be lost in the maze created through the interaction of characters. His poetry, then, serves to preserve for him, and validate for the reader who can share his experience imaginatively, the progressive unfolding of his central intuition, which is in brief that the individual can only escape from the self-imposed prison of the ego by accepting to meet ‘otherness’ in creative conflict, at a level far below that of social relations and mental activity, on the deeper ground of the ‘blood-consciousness’ he shares with all the other creatures, gaining the sense of the frightening and wonderful non-human quality of Life, which leaves man with no valid claim to domination and even permanence as a fixed form of life in the created universe, but with the conviction that even after death he is still caught in the eternal process of creation.