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D. H. Lawrence seems rather out of fashion these days, but let me put my cards on the table at the outset: I have loved Lawrence since I was about 12, and I still think he was a genius who wrote wonderfully about both women and children — and how women feel about children — despite being (shocker!) neither a woman nor a parent. Cancel me now!

I came back to Lawrence recently for a couple of reasons. Since we moved to France I’ve been recalibrating my Anglocentric sense of modernism as I read more widely in French literature; and this term I’m doing a little local teaching, including some of Lawrence’s prose and poetry. I’ve owned the huge Penguin Complete Poems for decades. It’s a daunting brick running to nearly 1100 paperback pages, collected and edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts; my edition is dated 1993 and it cost £13, which was a lot for a paperback in the early 90s. Knowing that I would be teaching Lawrence this term, I picked up my copy from my mother’s house when we were back in the UK at Christmas. Since then I’ve been reacquainting myself with it. For years I’d thought often of a handful of favourite poems, but hadn’t ranged much beyond that, and I’ve been moved and surprised at what I’ve found.

When I asked on Twitter last week if people had a favourite Lawrence poem, most responded — just as I’d expected — with either ‘Piano’ or ‘Snake’, probably the two most anthologised of his poems and, I suspect, most durable in anthologies — I mean that as anthologies include less and less of Lawrence, these have had the most staying-power. I was surprised that there weren’t more mentions of ‘Bavarian Gentians’, which I thought would be up there as an anthology piece, but perhaps its dependence on mythology and a kind of ominous eroticism have seen it fall a bit out of favour. Several respondents mentioned other animal poems from Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), by far his best-known collection and, perhaps it’s fair to say, what his reputation as a poet rests upon today.

Here though I have to admit that I have always struggled a bit with Lawrence’s animal poems, not because I hadn’t enjoyed reading them, but rather because they hadn’t been my favourites as a teenager. The impression I got that these were considered the core of his work, the best part, ended up slightly putting me off his poetry as a whole — even though when I had first read in it freely, unaware of what I was ‘meant’ to like best, I had loved a lot of it. Certainly this was partly my failure — a failure in particular to appreciate the tenderness and humour of many of the animal poems, as well as their remarkable originality. Lawrence’s free verse can be sprawling, though, and repetitious: at its strongest, the repetition has an incantatory force, but sometimes it just seems a bit baggy. I was very tolerant of these features in his prose, but less so in the poetry.

But the animal poems are wonderfully observed, and this time round I particularly enjoyed the tortoise poems and the bold variety of Lawrence’s diction: “Whither away, brisk egg?” (from ‘Tortoise Family Connections’) is tender and funny but also bracingly, weirdly quasi-allusive. Its oddness, hovering on the verge of translationese, reminded me of literal translations of Greek tragedy, and also of Macbeth (“What, you egg!” as the murderer says to Macduff’s son as he kills him). It also reminded me, powerfully though obscurely, of Edward Taylor’s poem “Christ’s reply”: “My chick, keep clost to me”.

‘Tortoise Family Connections’ is particularly dense with scriptural allusions, even by Lawrence’s standards, which is perhaps why I thought of Taylor. No-one can read any Lawrence without being aware of the mass and majesty of scripture which rises up through his prose and verse alike. I think rises up is the right word. If you read Eliot, for instance, the scriptural scaffolding of his poems and allusions is obvious, but it is also highly self-conscious, you can hear him thinking about it and being consciously moved by it. (We might feel something similar is true of Geoffrey Hill.) In Lawrence you hear the kind of naturally scriptural register, an almost default scripturalism of diction, allusion and imagination, that’s familiar to anyone who’s read a lot of early modern literature. Lawrence is artful and self-conscious, often to beautiful effect, in his use of classical mythology — as in ‘Bavarian Gentians’ and indeed throughout the Last Poems from which it comes — but not in his use of the Bible, which runs, we feel, much deeper than that. Perhaps, in fact, it is this as much as his now so-easily-mocked mystical treatment of sex that has moved him out of contemporary accessibility.

I’d remembered this feature of Lawrence but I’d forgotten how much of the verse is not just shaped by scriptural language, and mystical in a general sort of way, but actually openly — if unconventionally — religious. This is especially true of the Last Poems, but even in Birds, Beasts and Flowers we find the remarkable sequence ‘The Evangelistic Beasts’. My favourite is St Luke’s bull, beginning:

A wall, a bastion,

A living forehead with its slow whorl of hair

And a bull’s large, sombre, glancing eye

And glistening, adhesive muzzle

With cavernous nostrils where the winds run hot

Snorting defiance

Or greedily snuffling behind the cows.

And ending, unforgettably:

And so it is war.

The bull of the proletariat has got his head down.

I’d love to try this out on a good class alongside the opening of Bunting’s Briggflatts (‘Brag, sweet tenor bull’). Taking stock of Lawrence as a religious poet, not just a religiously-informed one, made me think of his formal experiments in a new light, alongside French poets of roughly the same time like Claudel, Valéry and St-John Perse.

Lawrence’s verse is often prolix, and that impression is intensified by the enormous size of the Complete Poems, which inevitably includes many largely unsuccessful pieces; rather like Robert Duncan, you sometimes have the impression that Lawrence just wrote a new poem each time rather than revising what he had. I think it’s fair to say that there are very few poems, perhaps even none, that couldn’t have been sharpened or improved at all; but equally, and rather remarkably given how many there are, there are very few where I find nothing of interest. This is true even in the very early verse, which has generally been dismissed by critics. Here’s the beginning and end of a poem originally published as ‘Song’ in April 1914:

Love has crept out of her sealèd heart

 As a field-bee, black and amber,

 Breaks from the winter-cell, to clamber

Up the warm grass where the sunbeams start.

[. . .]

Love makes the burden of her voice.

 The hum of his heavy, staggering wings

 Sets quivering with wisdom the common things

That she says, and her words rejoice.

He’s particularly good on bees. Here’s ‘A Baby Asleep After Pain’:

 As a drenched, drowned bee

Hangs numb and heavy from a bending flower,

 So clings to me

My baby, her brown hair brushed with wet tears

 And laid against her cheek;

Her soft white legs hanging heavily over my arm

 Swing to my walking movement, weak

With after-pain. My sleeping baby hangs upon my life

 Like a burden she hangs on me

[. . .]

It’s true, perhaps, that a lot of the best bits of the earlier verse could almost be Hardy, if it weren’t for a sort of sensuousness which is unmistakably Lawrence: even in the supposedly regular, rhyming poetry of the early years, there’s a metrical restlessness and formal inventiveness, a willingness to try out awkward or off-key effects, which is reminiscent of Hardy, as are — broadly speaking — the range of his subjects and modes.

Aside from Birds, Beasts and Flowers, the best poems I think are the last ones, titled simply ‘Last Poems’ in my edition. It has its climax in the longest poem, the marvellous sequence ‘The Ship of Death’, which is too long to quote here and deserves to be read in its entirety, but the ship is the leitmotif of the collection and appears first as the ships of the Greeks, of the lost but returned Argonauts, in the opening poems. Here is the second verse paragraph of the second poem, ‘The Argonauts’:

Now the sea is the Argonauts’ sea, and in the dawn

Odysseus calls the commands, as he steers past those foamy islands;

wait, wait, don’t bring me the coffee yet, nor the pain grillé.

The dawn is not off the sea, and Odysseus’ ships

have not yet passed the islands, I must watch them still.

Three features of the Complete Poems took me particularly by surprise this time round. The first was the vigour of the few brief pieces of critical prose which are included, and which I suspect I simply skipped in the past. The short 1919 essay ‘Poetry of the Present’, which you can read here, is a remarkable summary of what Lawrence thought was at stake in the move to vers libre, and, to be pragmatic for a minute, very well suited for teaching. Like Christopher Wase’s useful 1648 headnote on his experiments in Latin free verse, which I wrote about here, it shows us exactly what a poet at the time thought they were doing, and why.

The second surprise is something that’s not there: I couldn’t find a single translation, at least none that are marked as such. Can this really be the case? To have written none at all would make Lawrence very unusual among major poets, and is all the more surprising given how widely travelled he was. If anyone reading this has a less amateur knowledge of Lawrence than me and can shed any light here — are there translations that were excluded from the Complete Poems? or did he ever comment on his own lack of interest in or resistance to translation? — I’d be fascinated and grateful.

The third thing that surprised me was the section of poems relating directly to the First World War, in which Lawrence himself did not serve for reasons of ill-health, and to which he was bravely and vociferously opposed from the very outset, at considerable personal cost. In Complete Poems these pieces are found at the end of the section called ‘Rhymed Poems’ (although not all of them rhyme, and many poems included in ‘Unrhymed Poems’ do make use of rhyme). They date, however, from after some of the poems at the beginning of the ‘Unrhymed’ section — that is, Lawrence returned to a more conventional kind of prosody for these pieces. I found a lot of the war poetry striking — including ‘Ruination’, ‘War-Baby’, ‘Noise of Battle’ and ‘At the Front’ (neither of which I can find online at all) — especially because I don’t remember seeing him included in anthologies of the poetry of the First World War. Here’s the start of ‘Rondeau of a Conscientious Objector’, with it striking use of the phrase ‘the waste lands’:

The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous sands

And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the west.

I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands;

To-morrow will pour them all back, the dull hours I detest.

But there are excellent poems throughout the enormous Complete Poems, and of a much greater range of types and tones than I had remembered. I hadn’t remembered Lawrence as anything like a poet of the aphoristic lyric, but here, in ‘Autumn Rain’ (1917), he approaches something like that. I have found rediscovering Lawrence’s poetry a great pleasure, and I think this is a fine poem to end with:

The plane leaves

fall black and wet

on the lawn;

the cloud sheaves

in heaven’s fields set

droop and are drawn

in falling seeds of rain;

the seed of heaven

on my face

falling - I hear again

like echoes even

that softly pace

heaven’s muffled floor,

the winds that tread

out all the grain

of tears, the store

harvested

in the sheaves of pain

caught up aloft:

the sheaves of dead

men that are slain

now winnowed soft

on the floor of heaven;

manna invisible

of all the pain

here to us given;

finely divisible

falling as rain.

Thank you for reading Horace & friends. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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