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D H LAWRENCE:
In the hands of the unknown God
 Referring to the determinants of Blake’s muse earlier in this series
reminded one of D H Lawrence (1885-1930). It is not surprising,
therefore, that the introduction of the latter should recall the former.
Both writers shared a loathing for the oppressiveness of British
civilisation and a passion to reveal a new world of human experience.
Both held that the key to this to lay in the rediscovery of the
instinctive, intuitive side of the human personality .And both pursued
their mission with a religious fervour which led to excesses of
expression both quantitative and qualitative. As TS Eliot said of
Lawrence, he had to write a lot badly in order to write well sometimes.
But those times were enough to put Lawrence among the outstanding poets
and poetic influences of the modern age.
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D H Lawrence |
Lawrence believed that the re-integration of the psyche brought about
a new vitality of being, what he called being “man alive”, which led in
its turn to the reforging of the vital relationship between man and his
“circumambient universe”. Thus his poetry often deals with experiences
which provide an insight, to an extent hitherto unrealised in English
poetry, into the unique otherness of inanimate and animate nature.
Emerald trees
“The Enkindled Spring” finds the poet lost in wonder at the
springtime “flaming” of nature around him: “This spring as it comes
bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and
flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.
“I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on
the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and the sparks that puff
in wild gyration...” Note how the remarkableness of the phenomenon of
spring, usually taken for granted and described in conventional terms,
is captured by the elaborated metaphor of fire.
The wonder and the insight grow deeper in the contemplation of the
“Snake” “A snake came to my water-trough On a hot, hot day, and I in
pyjamas for the heat, To drink there.....
“Someone was before me at my water trough, And I, like a
second-comer, waiting.
“He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, And looked at me
vaguely, as drinking cattle do, And flickered his two-forked tongue from
his lips, and mused a moment, And stooped and drank a little more, Being
earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth On the
day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.”
Rather like Hopkins’ “heart in hiding stirring for a bird in “The
Windhover”, the poet is transfixed by the spectacle of the reptile. But
unlike Hopkins, Lawrence does not compare the creature to himself and
apply it to his own experience.
The abiding effect of the poem is of the strangely dignified
otherness of the snake, its deep connection with “the secret earth”.The
poet’s belated abortive attempt to kill it, which he immediately
regrets, adds to this effect by demonstrating that conventional human
responses to the natural world invariably disrupt man’s vital ties with
it.
Unlike the “spring” poem, this has neither rhyme nor lines of regular
length. And a regularly accentuated rhythm, which even the former poem
had little enough of, is almost completely absent.
Prose-writing
This is, in fact, the first example of “free verse” we have
encountered in this series, and which has increasingly come to
characterise modern poetry..However, as Eliot pointed out, no verse is
entirely free if the poet wants to do a good job, and such is the case
here. Even if there is no conventional verse rhythm, there is
nevertheless a rhythm that is determined by the sense and the cadence of
the words themselves, rather like the rhythm of creative prose-writing
of which Lawrence was a pioneer.
His own view was that “poetry of the present or instant poetry”,
dealing with the immediate experience of life, the living moment, and
emanating from “the instant, whole man”, should not be subjected to the
“static perfection of restricted verse.” The success of this beautiful
poem certainly vindicates that view.
Yet, some of Lawrence’s best poetry is also written in more or less
regular verse, and this is often the case when he is dealing with
personal relationships, where the sense of the past or the future or
both is as present as the present itself.
Such is “In a Boat”: “See the stars, love, In the water much clearer
and brighter Than those above us, and whiter, Like nenuphars...
“When I move the oars, love, See how the stars are tossed, Distorted,
the brightest lost, - So that bright one of yours, love....
“What then, love, if soon Your light be tossed over a wave? Will you
count the darkness a grave, And swoon, love, swoon?”
Satirical verse
Lawrence is partly associated with the early 20th century Imagist
movement which insisted on verbal economy with hard, clear-cut images
that spoke for themselves. In the above poem the larger but fragile
image of the stars in the water is beautifully traced, while Lawrence
with a modicum of comment endows the imagery with the dramatic context
that intensifies the sense of the fragility of human love.
Lawrence’s hatred of British civilisation for its artificiality and
its repression of, or “doing dirt upon”, the true sources of human
vitality, often found expression in satire. His satirical verse is
humourless like Pope’s but lacks the latter’s grace, it is serious like
Johnson’s but without his urbanity.
These are compensated, however, by devastating psychological insight.
Consider this from “How Beastly the Bourgeois Is.” “Isn’t he handsome?
Isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen? Doesn’t he look the fresh
clean Englishman, outside?.....
“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. Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool
or a bully...” Although Lawrence’s particular bugbear was the British
specimen, the ubiquity of this species in all cultures is only too
evident.
Ideal experience
Lawrence’s most famous poem is probably “Piano”, which shows that,
for all his vaunted commitment to the the demands of the present, he was
not immune to the power of nostalgia. Who among us, too, has not
experienced that “The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is
cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the
past.”
In fact, as this and some of the other examples above show, Lawrence
wrote his finest poetry when he realised that his own limitations often
brought him in conflict with the ideal experience of life he so
restlessly sought. The greatest limitation he had to come to terms with
was his impending death (of tuberculosis).
This is why in “Shadows” he seems at last to have found peace in
realising that, no longer able to come to his own salvation through
being “man alive’, he was now, whether he lived or died, in the hands of
a hitherto unknown God.
It begins, “And if to-night my soul may find her peace In sleep, and
sink in good oblivion, And in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
Then I have been dipped again in God, and new created.
And it ends, ”Then I must know that still 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.” |
