The Poetry of Lawrence by D. H. Lawrence

First published:Love Poems and Others, 1913; Amores, 1916; Look! We Have Come Through, 1917; New Poems, 1918; Bay 1919; Tortoises, 1921; Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, 1923; Pansies, 1929; Nettles, 1930; Last Poems, 1932; Fire and Other Poems, 1940; The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1964

Critical Evaluation:

In a note to his COLLECTED POEMS of 1928, D. H. Lawrence explains that he tried to arrange the poems in chronological order “because their personal nature made them, in effect, a biography of inner life and experience. Lawrence’s poetry, which is not widely read, succeeds for just this reason; reading through the volumes, one must agree with the poet, for the poems, rough as they often seem, sometimes even crude and apparently rapidly composed, are everywhere alive; they pulse with the currents and cross currents of their author’s tempestuous life and affairs. This effect is remarkable in any body of poems, and Lawrence’s are also remarkable for their haunting, incantatory cadences. In other words, the poems are seldom witty or intellectually complex; they do not sustain, nor often require, a great deal of explication or analysis. Perhaps better, they require, even demand, that the reader open himself to them, to the gusts of emotions—anger, bitterness, tenderness, outrage, nostalgia, regret, love—which make up their form and content, and which are artistically controlled and expressed chiefly in haunting though generally a-metrical rhythms.

The poems, up to 1923, revolve around Lawrence’s early loves, and his mother, especially. The background of these poems, which are all rhymed, may be supplied easily by anyone familiar with his autobiographical novel, SONS AND LOVERS. Then there is the death of his mother, which completes the volume of rhymed poems and forms, as Lawrence says, the “climax” of the first volume of the collected poems. Chronologically overlapping these poems, which run through the war into 1918, are the unrhymed poems of LOOK! WE HAVE COME THROUGH, the poems which deal mainly with the love and torments of his marriage to Frieda, who left a husband and two children to marry Lawrence, and their life in Austria and in England during the war. The poems in “Birds, Beasts and Flowers” are mainly of the Mexican and New Mexico sojourn of 1920-1923, and conclude the first volume. Beyond these, Lawrence’s poems, most notably in PANSIES and NETTLES, become stridently political and anti-social. Roughhewn and full of disdain, anger, and even hate, often near hysteria, full of preachings and pronouncements, these poems are mostly ephemera. Then, with last poems like “The Ship of Death,” he reaches the apex of his poetic career. Haunting, mysterious, religious, the poem is a unique contribution to modern verse.

It is nearly impossible to illustrate the nature of Lawrence’s poetry with short quotations, for the poems build slowly from a perception, an image, to a flash of realized emotion. They are deceptively simple, for the curve of feeling is often very complex. They are organic growths, and the art with which Lawrence can build a poem to a climax is disarming. Details are introduced; they slowly become focused and symbolic as a persona, a viewpoint, is established, a conflict—emotional, sexual—is gradually engaged and developed through incremental repetition. Then the full experience blossoms forth, usually directly stated, and the poem, a little drama built out of the countercurrents of image and response, is completed. To quote a line or stanza hardly reveals the process, for it is a process, a chaffing, rhythmic movement building a tension and bringing a release, that is Lawrence’s method. There is, therefore, more intensity and significance in the cadences and reiterations of detail than in single images or memorable lines. The poems grow, develop; they are not set pieces at all. Of course, all poems work in some such way, but Lawrence’s more purely so, and with the attendant risk of flatness, prosaic-ness, and loss of form.

At his best, however, the accumulating reiteration of line, image, and thought has the effect of a chant or incantation. The poem becomes, as in “The Ship of Death” or in “Bavarian Gentians,” a kind of ritual; or, in a poem like “Snake,” it is as if the poet’s nerves were laid bare, quivering. In one of his early poems, “The Scent of Irises,” Lawrence displays the facility with which he can develop a response, in this case to a jar of iris in the classroom where he was teaching. The iris and his lonely slavery as a schoolteacher take him back to an earlier time, in the country, with a girl. The internal rhyme and alliteration, the way the lines are “rove-over,” the strongly cadenced anapestic-like rhythm with the beautifully manipulated double stresses, the repetition of syntactic phrases and clauses, may, in their chanting effect and syncopation, remind one of Hopkins or Whitman or Dylan Thomas, and rightfully so. The developing tensions between the girl and the flowers, between sexual blossoming and the reminder, in the last line, of death, illustrates, in part, the manner in which Lawrence characteristically works. There is strife here, between the “you” of the girl and the “me” of the poet; the tone is half-nostalgic, half-bitter. The love and the simultaneous hate vie for precedence with desire and scorn: cross currents of emotion. The “Scent of Irises” is a very typical and compelling poem, as are the better-known “Love on the Farm,” “Lightening,” and “Monologue of a Mother,” all from the early poems.

“Piano,” from the last volume of the rhymed poems, BAY, is one of Lawrence’s best-known poems but is often dismissed with the charge of sentimentality. The poem relates how the poet, listening to a woman sing, is reminded of his mother singing to him as a child, and how that remembrance sweeps his manhood away. The poem is about the dominion of mother over even the adult man, and one may say that the poem is about a particularly pernicious sentimentality, but the poem is not sentimental, for Lawrence has objectified and dramatized the experience. His tormenting love for Frieda is well expressed in “A Young Wife,” from LOOK! WE HAVE COME THROUGH. The experiences reflected in this volume begin in 1912 and extend to the winter of 1916. In the poem the ambivalent feelings, the tension between love and fear, are expressed in images of darkness and night. The darkness becomes a favorite image for Lawrence, as it appears to symbolize or suggest both death and the profound, mysterious, and instinctual inner life. Lawrence, who grew up in the raped countryside of the Midlands, whose father was a victim of the mines, became in “philosophy” a primitivist who felt that modern society had buried man’s instinctual, most human self. He advocated a retreat from rationality and a rediscovering of the primitive “blood-consciousness” of emotional and instinctive being. His novel THE PLUMED SERPENT depicts a revolution in Mexico, behind which lies the revival of the ancient Indian god Quetzalcoatl, whose “return” is accompanied by rituals which include the shedding of blood. The forms of modern culture were to be swept away; and the original man, including his cruelty, was to be resurrected. In another poem, “Snake,” Lawrence vividly describes his horror at seeing a snake emerge from a hole in the ground and drink at the water fountain. He throws a stick at it, signifying modern man’s fear of the primitive, the secret, and, by extension, the sexual. Then the poet is disguste with himself for such a reaction of fear and cowardliness. The snake is described in terms which relate him to the ancient, primitive past, to the mythic. In Lawrence’s view it is that modern “voice” of education which must be overcome, so that men can live as men again, and not as machines or as slaves to machines and the bloodless, passionless machine-owners, such as Lady Chatterley’s symbolically crippled husband.

Lawrence’s movement, in his verse, toward themes dealing with ancient myth and ritual is evidenced by this first stanza from “Middle of the World,” one of his last poems, in which he asserts that the sea will never grow old, lose its blueness, or fail to raise its watery hills in the dawn-light as the ship of Dionysos, grape vines decorating its masts and attended by leaping dolphins, sails the waves.

Here is cadenced verse, working very close to prose, but highly poetic in its control, in its patterning of syntax, and the movement of symbolic images. Dionysos is, of course, a symbol and the repository of the life of passion, of instinct, and of freedom from the bindings of rationality. The sea is a symbol of fruition and life.

Lawrence searched the globe for a place where he could feel the ancient pulse of life still beating, but perhaps nowhere did he feel it more than in the burial caves of the ancient Etruscans; the vaults are vividly decorated with images of hunting and of other activities. From the Etruscan caves Lawrence drew the main images and primitive conception of death which informs “The Ship of Death.” Perhaps his greatest poem, it was rewritten many times, but the reader will find it fully rewarding simply to read as one poem the many versions. It is a ritual chant in praise of death and man’s journey toward obliviousness. In this poem Lawrence refers to the Etruscan belief in a kind of rebirth, when souls will need their tools and crockery, and the ship, which sails to oblivion, sails on through to a new life, where peace is renewed within the heart.

No quotation can communicate the poem. Alternately elegiac and joyful, the cadences subtly modulated to fit the moods, Lawrence here plumbs, as it were, his vision of death and touches on the rock of belief he found in ancient ritual and culture.

“Bavarian Genetians” also depicts an imaginative journey to the underworld, where in the mysterious life in darkness Lawrence chants, in images of Pluto’s hell and of Persephone, his mythic sense of death and rebirth in the darkness of lost and legendary time.