D.H. Lawrence and the art of poetry

[Part 1]

Continued from September 1

When we scan the critical literature on Lawrence’s poetry as it has evolved during the last half a century or so, we begin to see two dominant approaches. The first maintains that his poetry is vitiated by a lack of form and the absence of recognition of the importance of rhythm- a serious disregard for rhythm. This view has been advanced by others, the influential American critic R.P. Blackmur. His essay, written some decades ago, still generates acute debate.

It is his belief that while recognising that Lawrence as a poet possessed indubitable gifts, his poetry was undercut by what he termed ‘the fallacy of faith in expressive form.’ He defines this as the belief, ‘that if a thing is only intensely enough felt its mere expression will give it satisfactory form, the dogma, in short, that once material becomes words it has its own best form.’ Blackmur, I am persuaded, has a point but he labours to overstretch it.

Rhythms

D.H. Lawrence for his part felt that his rhythms captured well the moods that he was seeking to communicate and enact. He once remarked, ‘my rhythms fit my mood pretty well, in the verse. And if the mood is out of joint, the rhythm often is. Have always tried to get an emotion out in its own course, without altering it. It needs the finest instinct imaginable, much finer than the skill of a craftsman.’ Here Lawrence, no doubt, puts up a good defence; even so, it is my belief that there are many passages- far too many in fact – that are vitiated by the absence of a persuasive rhythm,

The second approach argues that Lawrence’s poetry contains organic or expressive form and his rhythm cogently conveys the surge of immediate emotion as they overflow the perimeter of conventional form. British critics such as A..Alvarez and Vivian de Sola Pinto have maintained this position. And the English critic D.J. Enright somewhat amusingly sated that,’ If these poems (Lawrence’s) are lacking in craftsmanship, then so much the worse for craftsmanship.’

Alvarez points to an important aspect of Lawrence’s poetry. He observes that, ‘Lawrence’s controlling standard was delicacy; a constant, fluid awareness, nearer the checks of intimate talk than those of regular prosody. His poetry is not the outcome of rules and formal craftsmanship, but of a purer, more native and immediate artistic sensibility. It is poetry because it could not be otherwise.’

These are the two dominant approaches that have guided the critical thinking for many decades. In recent years, the Indian novelist Amit Chaudhuri has proposed a newer pathway to the understanding of his poetry. In his book titled D.H. Lawrence and Difference (this is based on is doctoral thesis submitted to Oxford University), he argues for a novel way of investigating the poetic output of Lawrence, This book, in my judgment, is the most innovative critical treatise on Lawrence’s poetry and eminent critics and poets such as Terry Eagleton and Tom Paulin agree with this assessment. I plan to discuss this book later.

D.H. Lawrence wrote much free verse in his later life. It was his belief that free verse enabled the poet to capture the emotions in their stark intimacy and unimpeded flow. As he claimed, ‘all we can say is that free verse does not have the same nature as restricted verse. It is not of the nature of reminiscence. It is not the past which we treasure in its perfection between our hands.

Neither is it the crystal of the perfect future into which we gaze……in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment.. Lawrence is opposed to chopping up prose and presenting them as free verse. He says that to break the lovely form of metrical verse, to offer the fragments as a new form called free verse is what many of the free versifiers do. He emphatically said that, ‘they do not know that free verse has its own nature, that it is neither star nor pearl, but instantaneous like plasm.’

Free verse

Although he wrote much free verse, in the earlier stages in his career he composed metrical verse often inspired by Thomas Hardy. He recognised the importance of metrical verse and the potential role it could play in literature. A metrical poem of Lawrence that I particularly like is titled Corot. It seeks to capture in pulsating language the inexorable flow of time.

The subtle, steady rush of the whole
Grey foam-mist of advancing time
And it silently sweeps to its somewhere, its goal,
Is seen in the gossamer’s rime.
Is heard in the windless whisper of leaves
In the silent labour of men in the field
In the downward dropping of flimsy sheaves
Of cloud the rain-skies yield.
In the trapping haste of a fallen leaf,
In the flapping of red-roof smoke, and the small
Footstepping tap of men beneath
Dim trees so huge and tall

Another poem that I like – it is collected in the section titled Rhythmic Verse in complete poems – is titled, ‘End of Another Home-Holiday.’ It examines the sense of guilt experienced by the poet for leaving his home and mother. It is a poem inspired by Walt Whitman’s when Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’. This is how Lawrence begins his what for me is a memorable poem.

When shall I see the half-moon sink again
Behind the black sycamore at the end of the garden?
When will the scent of the dim white phlox
Creep up the wall to me, and at my open window?.

Lawrence, as I said earlier, wrote much bad poetry. However, it has also to be recognised that he is the author of scores of deeply moving and memorable poems that display a sensibility of the highest order. I wish to consider briefly, two poems which I think are highly successful. They display vividly the characteristic strengths of D.H. Lawrence as a poet. The first is titled ‘Snake.’ and it is a poem to which we in Sri Lanka can respond readily. This is how the poem begins, setting the stage for an intense emotional conflict.

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

The poem sets tension between his head and heart; his head tells him to kill the snake and his heart opposes that action. ( What we sense here is, to invert a line of Thomas Hardy, ‘when, in your being, mind concedes to heart).

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, if you are a man
You would take a stick and beat him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water tough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of the earth?

In this poem, then, Lawrence through his vibrant language and persuasive rhythms capture vividly an interaction between the human and animal worlds that he has chosen to deal with in many of his poems. The Snake is a powerful and memorable poem; it is dramatic at the purely physical level. However, it operates at different levels of symbolic significance. It can be and has been read as representing the dignity of non-human life, the nature of otherness, the conflict between civilisation and instinct (a favourite Laurentian theme) , complexities of sexuality and so on.

Vivian de Sola Pinto, an expert on Lawrence’s poetry has said that although the Sicilian snake in the poem is ordinary, as the poem unfolds it assumes a mythical significance – it becomes a god-like lord of the underworld, an enactment of the myriad dark and mysterious forces of nature that man invariably fears and neglects. Another critic has asserted that the poem dramatises with the paradoxical godliness of that which is not only other than but also evidently less than man.

Keith Sagar, another well-known critic of Lawrence’s poetry says that this poem is a clear materialisation of the appearance and distinct life-mode of a snake. Alvarez makes a similar point when he claims that the structure of the poem mimetically suggests the movement of the snake; in other words, here the form enacts the theme. As he says, ‘the sibilant, slithering alliterative s’s, the slack undulating rhythms, the whole stanza trailing through one sentence of seven long lines, serve to enforce this enactment.

To my mind, part of the strength of ‘Snake’ resides in the way the unconscious and unconscious forces are put into play thereby drawing the reader into the vortex of the experience. As R.P.Draper says that when we explore this poem in the larger context of Lawrence’s other writings, the snake can be instantaneously identified as emblematic of those unconscious forces that he insistently valorises as life-affirming; and the poetic persona’s repudiation of the snake is a part of the hyper-consciousness that Lawrence so often condemns as contributing to the root of evil in modern western, industrial civilisations. And it has to be said that passages such as the following capture this tension admirably.

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honored?
I felt so honored.

I have been enamoured by this poem for a long time. As an undergraduate at Peradeniya I published my first collection of Sinhala poems called Akal Vassa. In it I included a poem titled Miyagiya Kaha Kurulla;, which was inspired by Lawrence’s ‘Snake.’

Poetic revolution

In1960 the British literary critic Graham Hough published an important book titled Image and Experience in which he offered some very useful critical comments on the poetic revolution currently under way in the Anglo-Saxon world. In this book, there is an insightful essay in the nature and limitations of free verse and while commenting on the free verse of Lawrence he makes the following observation regarding what he calls ‘an interesting piece of versification.’ He says that the opening sentence which I quoted earlier, and which can be regarded as a self-contained stanza of three lines, illustrates the fact that we have here a rhythm that begins with no conventional verse firm. However, in the cluster of lines that follow, we become aware of rhythm as a vitalising force, guiding the flow of the emotion of the reader. He points out that words such as deep- strange- shade – great – dark – tree where the collocation of long heavy syllables intensifies and darkens the shadow. The delayed and self-controlling movement of ‘must wait, must stand and wait’ is juxtaposed with the rapidity of ‘for there he was at the trough before me.’

Hough makes the point that the rhythm that is being deployed so vigorously is not a verse rhythm and that it cannot be accommodated, however loosely, into conventional verse patterns that we know.

However, as the poem progresses, we observe a visible change in the rhythm. We begin to see passages of freely handled blank verse. As he says, ‘quite normal blank verse with a very free use of anapaestic substitution’. What we find in the Snake, then, is a complex rhythmic structure that enacts the flow of feeling in the poem. The Snake, therefore, is a poem that merits close analysis both in terms of content and form.

(To be continued)