“Crises” in D. H. Lawrence’s Poems
... dark door of the secret earth (CP, p.349) And these two sets of contrasts, one is between the noble snake and the bathetic “I”, the other is between the “pure, intuitive self” and the “civilized self”, are exactly what Lawrence meant to produce, not merely to create two opposed worlds of the civilized and the dark unknown, but more delicately to reveal their overlay, the difficulty in discovering the connections between them—a snake that can be at once “horrid” and “a king”, and “I” moralizing, yet reverential—the possibility for a transformative crossing from one to the next, the contradictions between “my two selves”. For Lawrence, these are experienced as a clash between incongruous inner and emotional states. It is not only a conflict of Lawrence’s “two selves”, but also a struggle in which anyone can humbly fail: And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords Of life. And I have something to expiate; A pettiness. (CP, p.351) Here the tension between the lofty and the low is played out to the bitter end in theme and lineation, with the worst crunch in the clipped last line, which appears to be exactly what it confesses, “A pettiness”. At the moment that it defeats our expectation of romantic closure, an elevated conclusion, the last line follows inevitably from the difficult logic of this poem as an envenomed final bite. This is a kind of pain when someone is cut from his intuitional relatedness with the cosmos, the pure nature. In Lawrence’s view, the conflict between one’s “civilized self” and “intuitional, pure self” is forever-lasting. In his poem, Lawrence expresses his contradictory “two selves” articulately. Relationship is the central subject of Lawrence’s art, and many of his poems reveal the “present crises” of his inner life. In the volume of Amores and Look! We Have Come Through! we can see that his poems are becoming increasingly focused on conflict, dialogue, and argument, for example, in “Bei Hennef”: You are the call and I am the answer, You are the wish and I the fulfillment, You are the night, and I the day. What else? It is perfectly enough. It is perfectly complete, You and I, What more——？ Strange, how we suffer in spite of this! (CP, p.203) Here a lack of permanent closure and a sense of estrangement produced at the edge of the poem drive the reader forward to add one poetic piece to the next. Still, the major force of cohesion in a verse sequence is the frequent use of internal monologue and the illusion, which this can create, of an internal debate. No matter how brief or how philosophical, Lawrence’s lyrics generally manage to imply dramatic engagement through the speaking voice, so that each poem articulates a temporary crisis. “Crises” also lies in other poems of love and marriage, in which Lawrence attempts to reveal the relation between man and woman, soul and body. For example, in the Amores version of “The Wild Common”: If my veins and my breasts with love embossed Withered, my insolent soul would be gone like flowers that the hot wind took. So my soul like a passionate woman turns, Filled with remorseful terror to the man she scorned, and her love For myself in my own eyes’ laughter burns. (CP, p.894) Here the crisis between the moral and countermoral could not be clearer: the soul requires its body, nature is her residence, and any woman who insists on soul over body will wither. We know that in Lawrence’s philosophy, “the life of mind” and “the life of body” contradict each other forever. Though Lawrence attempts consistently to merge the divided self, contradictions rise up frequently in his autobiographical poems. Contrariety is a fact of Lawrence’s own nature. As Frieda remarked, he identified with both Mellors and Clifford in Lady Chatterlley’s Lover. In a revealing passage in “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, he saw an inevitable split between body and mind: “All the emotions belong to the body, and are only recognized by the mind. We may hear the most sorrowful piece of news, and only feel a mental excitement. Then, hours after, perhaps in sleep, the awareness may reach the bodily centres, and true grief wrings the heart.”5 Thus, in “The Wild Common” listed above, we see that “the self of soul” and “the self of body” go in opposite directions. And of these “two selves”, “two lives”, which is true? Which is more pure? This is really a question for Lawrence, as well as for whole humankind. Another question dominates Lawrence in the last years of his life is bout death. After the experiences of serious illness and war, Lawrence begins a heroic quest into the relation between death and life. In his last one and a half years he brought three further works of poetry to a finished state, Pansies, Nettles, and Last Poems. Death is an important subject of a large number of these last poems, as in “Our Day Is Over”: Our day is over, night comes up Shadows steal out of the earth. … we wade, we wade, we stagger, darkness rushes between our stones, we shall drown. Our day is over night comes up (CP, p.425) Whereas Lawrence calmly allows that “our day is over” and “we shall drown”, there is still a battle to be fought: “we wade, we wade, we stagger…” So in this book the central agon is Lawrence’s struggle for life or death. This is not a struggle for life “or else” death. Lawrence is caught up in a different version of Hamlet’s question, whether to be or not to be: the question is, not how to choose between two kinds of living death, but how to decide between two ways of life, as in “To Let Go or to Hold on—?”...