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Poetry, Regeneration,
and D.H. Lawrence
At the very beginning Lawrence belonged to a different order of being from
the literary writers of his day. In 1912 he said: “I worship Christ, I worship
Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. But I do not worship hands nailed
and running with blood upon a cross, nor licentiousness, nor lust. I want them
all, all the gods. They are all God. But I must serve in real love. If I take my
whole passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in turn loves me,
that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work. All of which
I read in . . .”
Do you know what he read all that in? It makes you wince. He thought he found
that in Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912! In Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfred
Gibson, John Drinkwater, Rupert Brooke, John Masefield, Walter de la Mare,
Gordon Bottomley! What a good man Lawrence must have been. It is easy to
understand how painful it was for him to learn what evil really was. It is easy
to understand why the learning killed him, slowly and terribly. But he never
gave up. He was always hunting for comradeship — in the most unlikely places —
Michael Arlen, Peter Warlock, Murry, Mabel Dodge. He never stopped trusting
people and hoping. And he went on writing exactly the gospel he announced in
1912, right to the end.
Lawrence thought he was a Georgian, at first. There are people who will tell
you that his early poetry was typical Georgian countryside poetry — Musings
in the Hedgerows, by the Well Dressed Dormouse. It is true that early poems
like “The Wild Common,” “Cherry Robbers,” and the others, bear a certain
resemblance to the best Georgian verse. They are rhymed verse in the English
language on “subjects taken from nature.” Some of the Georgians had a favorite
literary convention. They were anti-literary. Lawrence was the real thing. His
“hard” rhymes, for instance, “quick-kick,” “rushes-pushes,”
“sheepdip-soft lip,” “gudgeon-run on.” I don’t imagine that when Lawrence
came to “soft lip” he remembered that bees had always sipped at soft lips and
that, as a representative of a new tendency, it was up to him to do something
about it. I think his mind just moved in regions not covered by the standard
associations of standard British rhyme patterns. At the end of his life he was
still talking about the old sheep dip, with its steep soft lip of turf, in the
village where he was born. Why, once he even rhymed “wind” and “thinned,” in
the most unaware manner imaginable. That is something that, to the best of my
knowledge, has never been done before or since in the British Isles.
The hard metric, contorted and distorted and generally banged around, doesn’t
sound made up, either. Compulsion neurotics like Hopkins and querulous old
gentlemen like Bridges made quite an art of metrical eccentricity. You turned an
iamb into a trochee here, and an anapest into a hard spondee there, and pretty
soon you got something that sounded difficult and tortured and intense. I think
Lawrence was simply very sensitive to quantity and to the cadenced pulses of
verse. In the back of his head was a stock of sundry standard English verse
patterns. He started humming a poem, hu hu hum, hum hum, hu hu hum hu, adjusted
it as best might be to the remembered accentual patterns, and let it go at that.
I don’t think he was unconscious of the new qualities which emerged, but I don’t
think he went about it deliberately, either.
This verse is supposed to be like Hardy’s. It is. But there is always
something a little synthetic about Hardy’s rugged verse. The smooth ones seem
more natural, somehow. The full dress, Matthew Arnold sort of sonnet to Leslie
Stephen is probably Hardy’s best poem. It is a very great poem, but Arnold
learned the trick of talking like a highly idealized Anglican archbishop and
passed it on to Hardy. That is something nobody could imagine Lawrence ever
learning; he just wasn’t that kind of an animal.
Hardy could say to himself: “Today I am going to be a
Wiltshire yeoman, sitting on a fallen rock at Stonehenge,
writing a poem to my girl on a piece of wrapping paper with the gnawed stub
of a pencil,” and he could make it very convincing. But Lawrence really was the
educated son of a coal miner, sitting under a tree that had once been part of
Sherwood Forest, in a village that was rapidly becoming part of a world-wide,
disemboweled hell, writing hard, painful poems, to girls who carefully had been
taught the art of unlove. It was all real. Love really was a mystery at the
navel of the earth, like Stonehenge. The miner really was in contact with a
monstrous, seething mystery, the black sun in the earth. There is a vatic
quality in Lawrence that is only in Hardy rarely, in a few poems, and in great
myths like Two on a Tower.
Something breaks out of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape of “Cherry Robbers.”
That poem isn’t like a Victorian imitation of medieval illumination at all. It
is more like one of those crude Coptic illuminations, with the Christian content
just a faint glaze over the black, bloody “Babylonian turbulence” of the
Gnostic mystery. I don’t know the date of the “Hymn to Priapus,” it seems to
lie somewhere between his mother’s death and his flight with Frieda, but it is
one of the Hardy kind of poems, and it is one of Lawrence’s best. It resembles
Hardy’s “Night of the Dance.” But there is a difference. Hardy is so anxious
to be common that he just avoids being commonplace. Lawrence is common, he
doesn’t have to try. He is coming home from a party, through the winter fields,
thinking of his dead mother, of the girl he has just had in the barn, of his
troubled love life, and suddenly Orion leans down out of the black heaven and
touches him on the thigh, and the hair of his head stands up.
Hardy was a major poet. Lawrence was a minor prophet. Like Blake and Yeats,
his is the greater tradition. If Hardy ever had a girl in the hay, tipsy on
cider, on the night of Boxing Day, he kept quiet about it. He may have thought
that it had something to do with “the stream of his life in the darkness
deathward set,” but he never let on, except indirectly.
Good as they are, there is an incompleteness about the early poems. They are
the best poetry written in England at that time, but they are poems of hunger
and frustration. Lawrence was looking for completion. He found it later, of
course, in Frieda, but he hadn’t found it then. The girl he called Miriam wrote
a decent, conscientious contribution to his biography. She makes it only too
obvious that what he was looking for was not to be found in her. And so the
Miriam poems are tortured, and defeated, and lost, as though Lawrence didn’t
know where he was, which was literally true.
Between Miriam and Frieda lies a body of even more intense and troubled
poems. Those to his mother, the dialect poems, and the poems to Helen are in
this group. The “mother” poems are among his best. They are invaluable as
direct perspectives on an extraordinary experience.
From one point of view Lawrence is the last of a special tradition that
begins with St. Augustine and passes through Pascal and Baudelaire amongst
others, to end finally in himself. There is no convincing evidence for Freud’s
theory that the Oedipus Complex dates back to some extremely ancient crime in
the history of primitive man. Least of all is there any Oedipus Complex in the
Oedipus myth or plays. There is ample evidence that Western European
civilization is specifically the culture of the Oedipus Complex. Before
Augustine there was nothing really like it. There were forerunners and
prototypes and intimations, but there wasn’t the real thing. The Confessions
introduce a new sickness of the human mind, the most horrible pandemic, and the
most lethal, ever to afflict man. Augustine did what silly literary boys in our
day boast of doing. He invented a new derangement. If you make an intense effort
to clear your mind and then read Baudelaire and Catullus together, the contrast,
the new thing in Baudelaire, makes you shudder. Baudelaire is struggling in a
losing battle with a ghost more powerful than armies, more relentless than
death. I think it is this demon which has provided the new thing in Western Man,
the insane dynamic which has driven him across the earth to burn and slaughter,
loot and rape.
I believe Lawrence laid that ghost, exorcised that demon, once for all, by an
act of absolute spiritual transvaluation. “Piano,” “Silence,” “The Bride,”
and the other poems of that period, should be read with the tenth chapter of the
ninth book of the Confessions. It is the beginning and the end. Augustine
was a saint. There are acts of salvation by which man can raise himself to
heaven, but, say the Japanese, a devil is substituted in his place. Lawrence
drove out the devil, and the man stepped back. Or, as the Hindus say, with an
act of absolute devotion from the worshiper, the goddess changes her aspect from
maleficent to benign.
It is not only that Lawrence opened the gates of personal salvation for
himself in the “mother” poems. He did it in a special way, in the only way
possible, by an intense realization of total reality, and by the assumption of
total responsibility for the reality and for the realization. Other people have
tried parts of this process, but only the whole thing works. This shows itself
in these poems, in their very technique. There, for the first time, he is in
full possession of his faculties. He proceeds only on the basis of the
completely real, the completely motivated, step by step along the ladder of
Blake’s “minute particulars.” Ivor Richards’s Practical Criticism
contains a symposium of his students on Lawrence’s “Piano.” It makes one of
the best introductions to Lawrence’s poetry ever written. And one of the
qualities of his verse that is revealed there most clearly is the uncanny,
“surreal” accuracy of perception and evaluation. Objectivism is a hollow word
beside this complete precision and purposiveness.
From this time on Lawrence never lost contact with the important thing, the
totality in the particular, the responsibility of vision. Harassed by sickness
and betrayal, he may have faltered in fulfilling that most difficult of all the
injunctions of Christ, to suffer fools gladly. He may have got out of contact
with certain kinds of men at certain times. He may have become cross and
irritable and sick. But he never lost sight of what really mattered: the blue
vein arching over the naked foot, the voices of the fathers singing at the
charivari, blending in the winter night, Lady Chatterley putting flowers in
Mellors’s pubic hair.
The “Helen” poems are strange. (See “A Winter’s Tale,” “Return,”
“Kisses in the Train,” “Under the Oak,” “Passing Visit to Helen,”
“Release,” and “Seven Seals.”) They all have a weird, dark atmosphere shot
through with spurts of flame, a setting which remained a basic symbolic
situation with Lawrence. It is the atmosphere of the pre-War I novel, young
troubled love in gas-lit London — draughty, dark, and flaring, and full of
mysterious movement. Probably the girl’s name was not Helen. Lawrence thought of
her as dim, larger than life, a demi-goddess, moving through the smoke of a
burning city. For certain Gnostics Helen was the name of the incarnate “female
principle,” the power of the will, the sheath of the sword, the sacred whore
who taught men love. Helen seems to have been the midwife of Lawrence’s manhood.
At the end, something like her returns in the Persephone of “Bavarian
Gentians.” Rebirth. No one leaves adolescence cleanly without a foretaste of
death.
Ezra Pound said that the dialect poems were the best thing Lawrence ever
wrote. This is just frivolous eccentricity. But they are fine poems, and in them
another figure of the myth is carefully drawn. They are poems about Lawrence’s
father, the coal miner who emerges nightly from the earth with the foliage of
the carboniferous jungles on his white body. Lawrence’s little dark men, his
Gypsies, and Indians, and Hungarians, and Mexicans, and all the rest, are not
dark by race, but dark with coal dust. The shadow of forests immeasurably older
than man has stained their skins. Augustine was never at peace until he found
his father again in the pure mental absolute of Plotinus. Lawrence found his
father again in the real man, whose feet went down into the earth. In certain
poems where he speaks as a fictional woman, the erotic intensity is embarrassing
to those of us who still live in the twilight of the Oedipus Complex. What had
been evil in the father image becomes a virtue, the source of the will; deeply
behind the mother image lies the germ of action, the motile flagellate traveling
up the dark hot tube, seeking immortality.
The boy watching the miners rise and descend in the yawning maw of the earth
in Nottinghamshire grows into the man of forty watching the Indians pass in and
out of a lodge where an old man is interminably chanting — there is a sense of
strangeness, but no estrangement. There is no effort to violate the mystery of
paternity because it is known in the blood. Lawrence knew by a sort of sensual
perception that every cell of his body bore the marks of the striped Joseph’s
coat of the paternal sperm.
All this world of the early poems, and of the novels, The White Peacock,
The Trespasser, the first draft of Sons and Lovers, is an unborn
world, a cave, a womb, obscure and confused. The figures have a mythic vagueness
about them. The sensual reality seems to be always struggling beneath an
inhibiting surface of flesh, struggling to escape into another realm of meaning.
So many of the images are drawn from birth, escape, confinement, struggle.
Critics have found much of their Freudianism in the work of this period. Had
they been better read they would have found Jung above all else, and certainly
Rank. Lawrence had yet to read Freud or Jung and may never have heard of Rank.
Some shockingly ill-informed things have been written about Lawrence’s
relation to psychoanalysis. In the first place, he was not a Freudian. He seems
to have read little Freud, not to have understood him any too well, and to have
disliked him heartily. In the winter of 1918-19 he read Jung, apparently for the
first time, in English. Presumably this was The Psychology of the Unconscious.
Jung was very much in the air in those days, as he is again. There was probably
a great deal of amateur talk about his ideas among Lawrence’s friends. But
Lawrence does not seem to have had much more to go on, and The Psychology of
the Unconscious is only the beginning of the system later elaborated by
Jung. Nor did he ever become intimate with any of Jung’s students. Later Mabel
Dodge tried to bring the two together by correspondence. The story goes that
Jung ignored her letters because they were written in pencil. So much for that.
Lawrence wrote quite a bit on psychoanalysis. There are the two books,
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, a somewhat sketchy popularization of
some of Jung’s basic concepts, and Fantasia of the Unconscious, of which
more in a moment. And then there are the reviews of Trigant Burrow’s book, and
miscellaneous remarks scattered through correspondence and reviews. This is all
of the greatest importance to the understanding of Lawrence.
Fantasia of the Unconscious is an extraordinary book. It is foully
written, unquestionably Lawrence’s worst writing, but it is certainly a landmark
in the history of psychoanalysis. It is an attempt to combine the empirical
neurology of Kundalini Yoga with his own interpretation of Jung’s psychology and
with a theory of sexuality which may be either his own or derived from popular,
occultist expositions of certain Gnostic sects and rumors of the practices of
Shakti-Yoga. When it appeared, it must have seemed like pure fantasy of the Lost
Atlantis variety. Jung’s Secret of the Golden Flower, and his studies of
“spiritual alchemy” lay in the future. The “psychology of the autonomic
system” was unheard of. It is all there, in Lawrence’s inspired guesses. The
white race is going mad, but it is the autonomic nervous system which is out of
kilter; what goes on in the head is secondary — and the autonomic nervous
system is, as a whole, the organ of communion.
To return to the poems. There is a hallucinatory quality in the images of the
poems which precede Frieda which it is interesting to compare with the induced
hallucination of H.D. The conflict in H.D. is hidden in herself. It is still
there to this day, although her latest prose work has been the journal of a
Freudian analysis. Her images are purified of conflict; then the intensity which
has been distilled from the sublimation of conflict is applied from the outside.
(“Your poetry is not pure, eternal, sublimated,” she told Lawrence.) What
results is a puzzling hallucination of fact, a contentless mood which seems to
reflect something tremendously important but whose mystery always retreats
before analysis.
Lawrence’s early poems are poems of conflict. The images are always
polarized. Antagonisms struggle through the texture. But the struggle is real.
The antagonisms are struggling toward the light. The conflict yields to insight,
if not to analysis. It is like the propaedeutic symbolism of the dream, as
contrasted to the trackless labyrinths of falsification which form the patterns
of most waking lives. The hallucination is real, the vision of the interior,
personal oracle. Its utterance has meaning, more meaning than ordinary waking
reality because the subjective is seen in the objective, emerging from it, the
dream from the reality — not dislocated or applied from outside the context.
The poems of Look! We Have Come Through fall into three groups. First
there are the structurally more conventional pieces like “Moonrise,” which
sounds a little like Masefield’s sonnets though it is incomparably finer, and
the “Hymn to Priapus,” and the others — they are all probably earlier and
have already been discussed. Second, there are the poems of the Rhine Journey,
“December Night,” “New Year’s Eve,” “Coming Awake,” “History”; erotic
epigrams, intense as Meleager, more wise than Paul the Silentiary. Lawrence was
still a young man, and had many great poems to write — but put these beside the
few poets who have survived from that day, Sturge Moore, Monro, De La Mare . . .
they look like pygmies. Only Yeats stands up against Lawrence. And last, there
are the Whitmanic free verse manifestoes, “explaining” marriage to a people
who had forgotten what it was.
With Frieda the sleeper wakes, the man walks free, the “child” of the
alchemists is born. Reality is totally valued, and passes beyond the possibility
of hallucination. The clarity of purposively realized objectivity is the most
supernatural of all visions. Bad poetry always suffers from the same defects:
synthetic hallucination and artifice. Invention is not poetry. Invention is
defense, the projection of pseudopods out of the ego to ward off the “other.”
Poetry is vision, the pure act of sensual communion and contemplation.
That is why the poems of Lawrence and Frieda on their Rhine Journey are such
great poetry. That is why they are also the greatest imagist poems ever written.
Reality streams through the body of Frieda, through everything she touches,
every place she steps, valued absolutely, totally, beyond time and place, in the
minute particular. The swinging of her breasts as she stoops in the bath, the
roses, the deer, the harvesters, the hissing of the glacier water in the steep
river — everything stands out lit by a light not of this earth and at the same
time completely of this earth, the light of the Holy Sacrament of Marriage,
whose source is the wedded body of the bride.
The accuracy of Lawrence’s observation haunts the mind permanently. I have
never stood beside a glacier river, at just that relative elevation, and just
that pitch, with just that depth of swift water moving over a cobbled bed,
without hearing again the specific hiss of Lawrence’s Isar. These poems may not
be sublimated (whatever YMCA evasion that may refer to), but they are certainly
pure and eternal.
Again, it is fruitful to compare the Rhine Journey poems with the only other
poems of our time which resemble them much, Ford Madox Ford’s Buckshee.
Ford was writing about something very akin to what Lawrence was, about an aspect
of marriage. But he was writing about its impossibility, about how life had bled
away its possibility from both him and his girl, and how they had taken, in
middle age and in the long Mediterranean drouth, the next best thing — intense
erotic friendship. And about how, every once in a while, marriage comes and
looks in at the window. The contrast with Lawrence and Frieda, sinking into the
twilight in the fuming marsh by the Isar, “where the snake disposes,” is
pathetic past words.
Ford’s “L’Oubli—Temps de Secheresse” and Lawrence’s “River Roses” and
“Quite Forsaken” are things of a kind and the best of their kind, but like the
north and south poles, there is all the difference in the world between them.
There is more communion in Frieda’s temporary absence than in the closest
possible kiss “under the catalpa tree, where the strange birds, driven north by
the drouth, cry with their human voices.” “Singular birds, with their
portentous, singular flight and human voices,” says Ford. This is the
Persephone of “Bavarian Gentians” and the Orphic birds which flutter around
the dying who are withdrawing themselves, corpuscle by corpuscle, from
communion. Lawrence would come there one day, with the dark blue flowers on the
medicine table and Frieda sleeping in a chair beside him, but he was on the
other side of the universe then — the early summer of 1912, in the Isartal, the
snow leaving the mountains.
After the Rhine Journey come the poems of struggle for a living adjustment.
The ceremonial glory of the sacrament passes from the forefront of
consciousness, and the period of adjustment to the background of life begins.
Every detail of life must be transformed by marriage. This means creative
conflict on the most important level.
Sacramental communion is bound by time. Mass does not last forever.
Eventually the communicant must leave the altar and digest the wafer, the Body
and Blood must enter his own flesh as it moves through the world and struggles
with the devil. The problem lies in the sympathetic nervous system, says
Lawrence. And it is not easy for two members of a deranged race, in the
twentieth century, to learn again how to make those webs mesh as they should.
Some of these poems are, in a sense, Frieda’s — records of her own interior
conquest. It is amazing how much they accomplished, these two. Today, revisiting
this battlefield between love and hate that is so carefully mapped in certain of
the poems, it is like Gettysburg, a sleepy, pastoral landscape dotted with
monuments and graves. Only maimed women and frightened men are Suffragettes
anymore. Hedda Gabler is dead, or lurking in the suburbs. We should be grateful
to Frieda. It was she who gave the dragon its death blow, and the Animus no
longer prowls the polls and bedrooms, seeking whom it may devour.
The Whitmanic poems seem to owe a good deal to Children of Adam and
Calamus. They look like Whitman on the page. But if read aloud with any sort
of ear, they don’t sound much like him. Whitman flourished in the oratorical
context of nineteenth-century America. He isn’t rhetorical in the invidious
sense; that is, there is nothing covert or coercive about him. 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 poetry of the Bible, the Psalms,
the song of Deborah, the song of Hezekiah, of Moses, the Benedicte, the
Magnificat, the Nunc Dimitus. All the devices of Hebrew poetry are there, and in
addition the peculiar, very civilized, self-conscious, “sympathetic” poetry of
St. Luke — those poems which have made his the “women’s Gospel,” and which
all good Englishmen must learn in childhood as part of the Morning and Evening
Prayer of the Church.
In the volume Look! We Have Come Through Lawrence was just beginning
to learn to write free verse. I don’t think some of the poems are completely
successful. They are diffuse and long-winded. He tries to say too much, and all
at the same pitch of intensity; there are no crises, no points of reference. On
the whole the most successful is “New Heaven and Earth.” It may not be a
perfect object of art but it is a profound exhortation.
Beyond Holy Matrimony lies the newly valued world of birds, beasts, and
flowers — a sacramentalized, objective world. “Look, we have come through” —
to a transformed world, with a glory around it everywhere like ground lightning.
The poems of Birds, Beasts, and Flowers have the same supernatural luster
that shines through the figures of men and animals and things, busy being part
of a new redeemed world, as they are found carved around the mandala of the
Blessed Virgin above some cathedral door or on some rose window.
Birds, Beasts, and Flowers is the mature Lawrence, in complete control
of his medium, or completely controlled by his demon. He never has any trouble.
He can say exactly what he wants to say. Except for the death poems, he would
never write better. (And too, after this, he would never be well again.) 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. It is the act of devotion in the worshiper that forces the
god to occupy the statue. It is the act of devotion in the sculptor that forces
the god to occupy the stone which the artist then pares to his invisible limbs,
tailors like cloth. It is never theology in the first; it is never aesthetics or any teachable craft in the
second. The craft is the vision and the vision is the craft.
Good cadenced verse is the most difficult of all to write. Any falsity, any
pose, any corruption, any ineptitude, any vulgarity, shows up immediately. In
this it is like abstract painting. A painting by Mondrian may look impersonal
enough to be reduced to code and sent by telegraph. Maybe. But it offers no
refuge, no garment, no mask, no ambush, for the person. The painter must stand
there, naked, as Adam under the eye of God. Only very great or very trivial
personalities dare expose themselves so.
Think of a few typical writers of cadenced verse: Whitman, Sandburg, Wallace
Gould, F.M. Ford, F.S. Flint, Aldington, Lola Ridge, and James Oppenheim.
(H.D.’s verse is primarily a counterpointing of accentual and quantitative
rhythms in patterns of Greek derivation. Pound’s verse is Latin in reference,
and usually quantitative.) How the faults stand out! Every little weakness is
revealed with glaring cruelty. Whitman’s tiresome posturing, Sandburg’s
mawkishness, Aldington's erotic sentimentality, the overreaching ambition of
Lola Ridge and Oppenheim — what a lot of sore thumbs standing out! Yet in many
ways these are good poets, and Whitman is a very great one.
Gould, Flint, and Ford were never dishonest, never overreached themselves,
did their best to say what they meant and no more, never bargained with art.
“The sentimentalist,” said Daedalus, “is he who would enjoy, without
incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.” They are not prophets, but
they are good poets because they rendered a strict accounting with their own
souls.
Sentimentality is spiritual realization on the installment plan. Socially
viable patterns, like conventional verse, are a sort of underwriting or
amortization of the weaknesses of the individual. This is the kernel of sense in
the hollow snobbery of Valéry. The sonnet and quatrain are like the national
debt, devices for postponing the day of reckoning indefinitely. All artistic
conventions are a method of spiritual deficit-financing. If they were abandoned,
the entire credit structure of Poets, Ltd., would be thrown into hopeless
confusion. It is just as well that the professors have led the young, in my
lifetime, away from free verse to something that can be taught. No one could be
taught to be Lawrence, but in a world where the led lead the leaders, those who
might pretend to do so are sure to be confidence men.
Lawrence’s free verse in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers is among the small
best ever written. It can be analyzed, but the paradigms produced by the
analysis are worthless. It cannot be explained away, demonstrated in a
mathematical sense. Neither, certainly, can any other great poetry; but at least
a convincing illusion can be created, and the young can be provided with
something to practice. A poem like “Bat” or the “Lion of St. Mark” moves
with a stately, gripping sonority through the most complex symphonic evolutions.
The music is a pattern of vibration caught from the resonant tone of Lawrence
himself. The concerto is not on the page, little spots with flags and tails on a
stave, but the living thing, evolving from the flesh of the virtuoso. It is like
Gregorian chant or Hindu music, one thing when sung at Solesmes, or in the ruins of Konarak, another when “rendered” by the
Progressive Choral Group or at a concert of the Vedanta Society of Los Angeles.
Again, the faults of Birds, Beasts, and Flowers are the excess of
virtue. Like anyone who knows he has something intensely important to say,
Lawrence found it hard to keep from being long-winded. I think a good deal of
his over-expansiveness and repetition is due to his methods of composition.
Some poets meditate in stillness and inactivity, as far away as possible from
the creative act. We know that Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot, by their own
testimony, spent long periods of time quiescent, inert as artists, turning over
and over the substance of vision within themselves. Sometimes, as in Baudelaire,
this process is extremely painful, a true desert of the soul. Months went by in
which the paper and pen were red hot, it was impossible for him to read, his
whole personality seemed engulfed in a burning neurasthenia. And then there
would come a period of peace, and slowly growing exaltation, and finally the
creative act, almost somnambulistic in its completion. Actual composition by
this sort of personality tends to be rare, and usually as perfect as talent
permits.
Lawrence meditated pen in hand. His contemplation was always active, flowing
out in a continuous stream of creativity which he seemed to have been able to
open practically every day. He seldom reversed himself, seldom went back to
rework the same manuscript. Instead, he would lay aside a work that dissatisfied
him and rewrite it all from the beginning. In his poetry he would move about a
theme, enveloping it in constantly growing spheres of significance. It is the
old antithesis: centrifugal versus centripetal, Parmenides versus Heraclitus. He
kept several manuscript books of his verse, and whenever he wanted to publish a
collection he would go through them and pick out a poem here and there, the ones
he considered had best handled their themes. Behind each poem was usually a
group of others devoted to the same material. His selection was always personal,
and sometimes it was not very “artistic.” Nettles, for instance, is a
selection of what are, by any standard, the poorer poems of the collections of
epigrams printed in Last Poems.
There are those who think these epigrams, the ones in
Pansies, and those in Last Poems, aren’t art. This opinion is
the product of a singular provincialism. It is true that, due to the reasons
just mentioned, they aren’t all successful, but they belong to a tradition, are
members of a species, which has produced some of the greatest poetry. Epigram or
maxim, Martial or La Rochefoucauld, the foundations of this tradition are far
more stable than those of the neo-metaphysical poetry produced, with seven
ambiguities carefully inserted in every line, by unhappy dons between the wars.
Any bright young man can be taught to be artful. It is impossible to teach
taste, but you can teach most anybody caution. It is always the lesser artists
who are artful, they must learn their trade by rote. They must be careful never
to make a false step, never to speak out of a carefully synthesized character.
The greater poetry is nobly disheveled. At least it never shows the scars of
taking care. “Would he had blotted a thousand lines,” said Ben Jonson of
Shakespeare. Which thousand? Lawrence was always mislaying those manuscript
books of poetry and writing around the world for them, just as Cézanne left his
paintings in the fields. Not for any stupid reason — that they were not Perfect
Works of Art — but simply because he forgot.
Eliot (who does not write that way), writing of Pound’s epigrams, points out
that the major poet, unlike the minor, is always writing about everything
imaginable, and so is in good form for the great poem when it comes. Practice
makes perfect, and those who wait for the perfect poem before putting pen to
paper may wait mute forever. I suppose it is the absolutism which swept over
popular taste in the wake of Cubism that has encouraged the ignorant to expect a
canzone of Dante’s in each issue of their favorite little magazine, a School of
Athens in every WPA mural. This is just greediness, like children who want it to
be Christmas every day. And it produces an empty, pretentious, greedy art.
Meanwhile, Pound’s “Les Millwin,” and Lawrence’s “Willy Wet-Legs,” quietly
pre-empt immortality, a state of being only rarely grandiose.
As far as I know the poems in the novel The Plumed Serpent have never
been printed separately. This book is one of the most important (he thought it
the most important) Lawrence ever wrote. It has brought forth all sorts of
pointless debate. People are always saying: “Well, I have lived in Mexico for
years and it simply isn’t like that.” Lawrence was not an idiot. He knew
it wasn’t. And in the first chapter he gave a very accurate and pitiful picture
of the “real” Mexico — sterile, subcolonial, brutal, with the old gods gone,
and the church gone, and the revolution a swindle, and nothing left but a
squalid imitation of Ashtabula, Ohio. And he knew the other side too, the pasty
frigid nymphomaniacs, the deranged women of Europe and America, who consider
themselves disciples of Lawrence and prowl the earth seeking Dark Gods to take
to bed. He wrote a story which should have destroyed them forever — “None of
That.” It should be read with The Plumed Serpent.
Every year there is less, but in Lawrence’s day there was still something, of
the primeval Mexico — at the great feast in Oaxaca, in the life of the peasants
in the remote villages, in the Indian communities in the back country. Lawrence
did not make any very definite contact with the ancient Mexico but he could see
and sense it, and he was fresh from a much less-touched primitive world — that
of the Navaho and Pueblo Indians of the Southwest. His materials were not as
abundant as they might have been but they were enough to build a book of ritual,
of the possible that would never be, of potentialities that would never emerge.
It is a book of ceremonial prophecy, but prophecy uttered in the foreknowledge
that it would never be fulfilled.
The reawakening of mystery, the revival of the old Aztec religion, the
political “Indianism” — even if it all came true, one knows it would be a
fraud, a politician’s device, as Indianism is in Latin America today. Lawrence
knew that, of course, and so the book is dogged with tragedy. One constantly
expects the characters to go out in a blazing Götterdämmerung in some
dispute with the police, like a gangster movie. They don’t, but maybe it would
have been better if they had, for eventually they tire; they seem to become
secretly aware that all this gorgeous parading around in primitive millinery,
this Mystery, and Fire, and Blood, and Darkness, has been thought up. There is
something Western European, British Museum, about it. The protagonist, Kate,
submits to her lover’s insistent Mystery, but rather out of ennui and loathing
of Europe than out of any conviction, and one feels that the book could have no
sequel, or only a sequel of disintegration, like Women in Love.
Still, in the middle of the book, before the fervor dies
out, Lawrence wrote as nearly as he could what he believed should be. If the
religion of Cipriano and Ramon is taken as an other-worldly system of values, it
is profound and true, and, due to the freshness of its symbols, tremendously
exciting. Also, it differs very little from any other religion that has
maintained its contacts with its sources. Ramon and Cipriano short-circuit
themselves where Christianity was short-circuited by Constantine, in the desire
to have both worlds, to found a political, religion — a Church. That, if any,
is the “message” of the book.
The mystery survives in the poems, just as the sacraments survived
Constantine. They are not the greatest poems Lawrence ever wrote, but they are
among the most explicit. This is Lawrence’s religion. Wherever he found it he is
now in complete possession of a kind of orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of the
heterodox — the symbolic world of the Gnostics, the Occultists, Tantrism, Jung.
In a sense they are failures, these poems, in the way that the Indian songs
published by the United States Bureau of Ethnology are not failures. But, again,
that is the message of the book. Finally you discover that you cannot make up
paganism. What you make up is a cult. There is nothing primitive about
Gnosticism, anymore than there is anything primitive about Theosophy. It is the
creation of over-civilized Hellenistic intellectuals. Tantrism too grew up in
India, in Buddhism and Hinduism, when civilization was exhausting itself. Jung
comes, with Lawrence, at the end of the career of Western European Man.
Lawrence, after all, was a contemporary of Niels Bohr and Picasso. And so his
poems are mystical poems — and the Aztecs were not mystics, they were just
Aztecs. This doesn’t invalidate the poems. They have very little to do with
ancient or modern Mexico, but they do express, very well, the personal religion
of D.H. Lawrence. They may be full of “occult lore,” but behind the machinery
is an intense, direct, personal, mystical apprehension of reality.
In the last hours Lawrence seems to have lived in a state of suspended
animation, removed from the earth, floating, transfigured by the onset of death.
Poems like “Andraitix,” “Pomegranate Flowers,” have an abstracted,
disinterested intensity, as though they were written by a being from another
planet. Others are short mystical apothegms. There is no millinery anymore, no occultism; they differ only in
their modern idiom from any and all of the great mystics.
And finally there are the two death poems, “Bavarian
Gentians” and “The Ship of Death.” Each was written over
several times. There exists a variant which can be taken as
a final, or pre-final, version of “Bavarian Gentians,” but
both are clusters of poems rather than finished products.
“The Ship of Death” material alone would make a small
book of meditations, a contemporary Holy Dying. It is
curious to think that once such a book would have been a
favorite gift for the hopelessly ill. Today people die in hospitals, badgered
by nurses, stupefied with barbiturates. This is not an age in which a “good death” is a desired end
of life.
All men have to die, and one would think a sane man would want to take that
fact into account, at least a little. But our whole civilization is a conspiracy
to pretend that it isn’t going to happen — and this, in an age when death has
become more horrible, more senseless, less at the will of the individual than
ever before. Modern man is terribly afraid of sex, of pain, of evil, of death.
Today childbirth, the ultimate orgiastic experience, has been reduced to a
meaningless dream; dentists insist on injecting Novocain before they clean your
teeth; the agonies of life have retreated to the source of life. Men and women
torture each other to death in the bedroom, just as the dying dinosaurs gnawed
each other as they copulated in the chilling marshes. Anything but the facts of
life. Today you can take a doctor’s degree in medicine or engineering and never
learn how to have intercourse with a woman or repair a car. Human
self-alienation, Marx called it. He said that was all that was really wrong with
capitalism. “Let us live and lie reclined” in a jet-propelled, streamlined,
air-cooled, lucite incubator. When we show signs of waking, another cocktail
instead of the Wine of God. When we try to break out, flagellation instead of
Holy Matrimony, psychoanalysis instead of Penance. When the machinery runs down,
morphine for Extreme Unction.
In a world where death had become a nasty, pervasive secret like defecation
or masturbation, Lawrence reinstated it in all its grandeur — the oldest and
most powerful of the gods. “The Ship of Death” poems have an exaltation, a
nobility, a steadiness, an insouciance, which is not only not of this time but
is rare in any time. It doesn’t matter who: Jeremy Taylor, the Orphic Hymns, the
ancient Egyptians — nobody said it better. And there is one aspect of the
“Ship of Death” which is unique. Lawrence did not try to mislead himself with
false promises, imaginary guarantees. Death is the absolute, unbreakable
mystery. Communion and oblivion, sex and death, the mystery can be revealed —
but it can be revealed only as totally inexplicable. Lawrence never succumbed to
the temptation to try to do more. He succeeded in what he did do.
This essay originally appeared as the Introduction to D.H. Lawrence’s
Selected Poems (New Directions, 1947; Viking, 1959). It was reprinted in
Bird in the Bush (New Directions, 1959) and in World Outside the Window:
Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (New Direction, 1987). Copyright 1947 Kenneth Rexroth
Trust.
Reproduced here by permission of New Directions Publishing
Corp.
[Another Rexroth essay on D.H. Lawrence]
[Other Rexroth Essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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