D. H. Lawrence and the art of poetry

Part 2

The second poem by Lawrence that I wish to discuss briefly is The Ship of Death. It is one of the last poems that he wrote before his death. It is long and ambitious and in many ways incomplete. However, it exemplifies what to me is the mature poetic art of Lawrence as manifested in the latter phase of his career. It blends in interesting ways, grandeur and calmness, artifice and spontaneity.

The title of the poem refers to the ancient burial practice placing a symbolic ship in the tomb with the corpse. The intention was that the ship would carry the dead person to heaven. As I will explain later, the imagery in the poem carries religious associations shared by many cultures. Vivian de Sola Pinto says that to communicate poetic experiences marked by the greatest delicacy, the finest intelligence and the fullest honesty was his goal, and after several unsuccessful and partly successful attempts, he achieved the objective in poems such as Snake and The Ship of Death.

This is how Lawrence begins his poem ‘The Ship of Death’; a sense of melancholy controls the movement of the thoughts and feelings.

D. H. Lawrence

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey toward oblivion.
The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.
And it is time to go, to bid farewell
To one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.

The tropes of fallen fruit, falling apples, fallen self connect to generate the theme of the passage of time and life that animates the poem. And the next few stanzas address directly the inevitability, and therefore, the need for preparation, for death.

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?
O build your ship of death, for you will need it.
The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall
thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth.
And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!
Ah! Can’t you smell it?

Note of urgency

Here we detect a note of urgency in the exhortations of the poet .The poem consists of ten sections and one hundred and seven lines. There is circularity to the progression of the poetic discourse. It begins with the inescapable process of ageing, the arrival of the autumn of life, the inevitability of death and the glimmer of rebirth and self-renewal. This is how the poem ends.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.
The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell
emerges strange and lovely.
And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
on the pink flood,
and the frail soul steps out, into her house again
filling the heart with peace.

The poem is replete with religious imagery that is not confined solely to Christianity. The ship of death is a trope that finds an echo in the sensibilities of diverse religions.(Sarachchandra, for example in his play Pemato Jayati Soko, based on a Buddhist narrative, made use of this image as a controlling device).Similarly, the image of the soul stepping out into its house is one that reminds one of the Upanishads. It is also interesting to note, that in Jim Jarsmuch’s remarkable film Dead Man, the concluding sequences focus on death and the dying protagonist in a boat, drifting by himself, to the sacred spot where the ocean and sky meet as enunciated in Native American mythology.

The attitude to death inscribed in this poem is one that has provoked the interest of many commentators. For example, the American poet Kenneth Rexroth discussing the ‘The Ship of Death’ says that our civilization is straining to perpetuate the myth that death will not happen and in our civilization there is a conspiracy to avoid facing it. In this context of thinking, Lawrence’s poem merits close attention. Rexroth makes the following assertion. ‘in a world where death had become a nasty, pervasive secret…..Lawrence re-instated 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, insouciance, which is not only of this time but rare in any time.’

Confusion of symbols

Some critics such as Blackmur have complained that there is a confusion of symbols, a needless clash of imagery in the poem. There is some substance to this charge, although the confusion could be read as the manifestation of a deeper ambivalence. What we find in poems such as the Snake and The Ship of Death that I have discussed is the desire on the part of Lawrence to fashion a new kind of poetic art that carried the power of intimate sensuous detail and the fluid movement of emotions as they succumb to, and resist, the lure of words.

In my last column I made the point that there are two broad approaches to the poetry of Lawrence that are displayed in the writings of well-known critics such as R.P. Blackmur, A.Alvarez and Vivian de Sola Pinto. In recent times, the Indian novelist Amit Chaudhuiri, with his remarkable book on Lawrence’s poetry titled Lawrence and Difference has joined the ranks of eminent critics of Lawrence’s poetry. He carves out a new and potentially more productive interpretive path to the poetry of Lawrence. As this book is not sufficiently known in Sri Lanka, except perhaps among a handful of Literary scholars, let me explain its significance for the benefit of Sri Lankan readers.

To my mind, Chaudhuri’s Lawrence and Difference is significant primarily for three reasons. First, it is an attempt to examine Lawrence’s poetry from a theoretically sophisticated post-colonial perspective. His poetry, by and large, has been commented upon in terms of the British poetic tradition. This is wholly understandable. However, with the expansion of the literary critical discourse in modern times, and the emergence of post-colonial studies as a significant mode of interrogation, it is important to recognize that Chaudhuri has sought to bring that perspective to bear on the analysis of Lawrence’s writings. Second, Amit Chaudhuri is a creative writer of distinction and he has introduced the importance of the creative process into the conversation of critical analysis of poetry.

During the past few decades, with the spread of modern literary theory, the creative process has begun to receive short shrift, and it seems to me that Chaudhuri has sought to rectify this situation. It is indeed a welcome move. While reading Lawrence’s political works as a close reader would, he has also been able to combine it with an understanding of the complex dynamics of the creative process.

Cultural theory

Third, Chaudhuri has engaged seriously modern cultural theory as exemplified in the works of such thinkers as Derrida, Foucault Barthes and Lacan, in his investigations into Lawrence’s poetry. While he is deeply conversant with their theories and formulations, he is also able to take a critical distance from their writings to pass critical judgments on their works. Because of these interpretive strategies on Chaudhuri’s part, I find his book most stimulating. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that eminent literary scholars such as Terry Eagleton have hailed Chaudhri’s work as path breaking. Tom Paulin, the distinguished poet and critic made the following assessment of this book.

‘Remarkably, Chaudhuri’s highly sophisticated post-colonial outlook brings Lawrence’s identification with the colonised subject, the subaltern, the other, into critical daylight. We see Lawrence, then, as both modernist and post-modernist. We see that Lawrence’s fascination with debris and raw material is opposed root and branch - or junk and wreck - to the work of art as intellectual and immortal monument, which Yeats advocates.’ He stresses the point that Chudhuri is able to establish the open-endedness and incompleteness of Lawrence’s poetry which is in many ways work-in-progress.

Paulin goes on to make the following claim. ‘Reading Chaudhuri, I saw that here is one of those classic works, such as Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice or Sean O’Faolain’s The Short Story, in which a gifted writer takes us deep into the heart of the creative process - theme, meaning, dreary descriptive and moral paraphrase fall away - and we are left with the artist at work in the workshop/studio/study. ‘ He goes on to assert that reading Chaudhuri is like listening to Hazlitt in conversation with Northcote. The English puritan imagination has here found a powerfully observant and intelligent critic. It is high praise indeed!

Amit Chaudhuri’s original intention, as he himself states, was to examine the sense of place and landscape in Lawrence’s poetry. It was his goal to chart the way in which his preoccupation with landscape evolved in his poetry over time. As he was pursuing this objective, he began to notice certain characteristics peculiar to Lawrence such as repetitions, words and images from earlier poems obdurately appearing in later poems, a certain incompleteness and open-endedness. He asked him the question, ‘was there a way, then, in which the redundancy and unfinishedness of this discourse could be addressed positively, in a reading that had other values to affirm than ambiguity, meaning, felicity of expression, and complexity of treatment and subject matter?’

When he pondered this question he began to realise the importance of Lawrence’s larger poetic discourse in which the individual poem could be usefully located. He came to realise the importance of intertextuality. In his own words, ‘each poem, thus, is intertextual because it has as its subject matter another poem, or text, made up of a recognisable assortment of signs which occur within the fabric of the larger Lawrentian discourse itself.’ In other words, for Chaudhuri, intertextuality is not only a means of exploring and naming the distinct discourse in which individual poems can be located but is also a way of contributing to the production of that discourse. This idea guides his study of Lawrence’s poetry.

Amit Chudhuiri in his analysis of Lawrence’s poetry invokes productively certain concepts formulated by modern French cultural theorists. Let us, for example, consider the notion of trace that plays so central a role in Jacques Derrida’s investigations. Chaudhuri has deftly pressed into service this idea. He says that the Derridean notion of trace that he has deployed suggests that in locutions, images, the multi-faceted power of the signifier is absolutely and uniquely present; that is to say, it contains within itself the traces of other signifiers. What this does is to challenge the self-enclosed nature of the poem and disrupt the framing devices and locate the poem in a wider discourse. Chaudhuri offers the following comment.

Intention

‘The language of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, as I have shown, is a play of traces. My intention has been to move away from this power structure, of individual readers reading individual poems, as Lawrence’s own discourse does everything to disrupt it, and demands a more participatory reading.’ Indeed, this is what he seeks to do in his study on Lawrence’s poetry. In other words, his critical gaze is focused not so much on the individual poem - although individual poems are important - as on the textual system (the phrase is mine, not his). He introduces a political dimension to this act of disruption. He wants to read Lawrence’s poems from his vantage point of a post-colonial reader. This has the salutary effect of turning deconstructive readings into politically-charged interpretations instead of the purely formalistic analyses they have become in the hands of many deconstructive critics.

The idea of intertextuality, according to Chaudhuri, is central to Lawrence’s poetic project. On the one hand, he draws on his earlier poems; he mines them for locutions, images, prosodic structures. On the other hand, he draws on other poets such as Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He recasts these influences in terms of his own sensibility and sets of priorities. Amit Chaudhuri has explained the twin forms of intertextuality in Lawrence’s poetry in great detail. His analyses, at least to this reader, are wholly convincing.

Another important analytical concept that Chaudhuri has highlighted in his book is that of participatory reading. As he says, ‘in this study, I have attempted to move away from the controlling, interpretative mode of practical criticism that aims at the explication of particular poems, and have tried to find a form of participatory reading that both allows for, and addresses, the repetitions and redundancies of Lawrence’s poetic language. In doing so, I have not altogether abandoned practical criticism or focus, but attempted to redefine its intentions and procedures and use them towards participatory ends.’ While engaging in this project, Chaudhuri had come to realise that Lawrence’s own concept of art is of it being a discourse that labours to move towards communality and participation; this is an attempt to abjure control and power. His poetics consist of interrogating through its emphasis on difference, the structures of power incarnated in traditional forms of reading.’ Here Chaudhuri is calling attention to an aspect of Lawrence’s poetics that has up till now been virtually ignored by literary critics.

What Chaudhuri is stressing here is the fact that the effort to situate individual poems in a larger discourse involves a more participatory reading of the compositions. The objective of such participatory reading is to locate individual poems in a more encompassing discourse; the idea is not to interpret or deconstruct them but rather to participate in the distinctive traits and in the significance of that discourse. According to Amit Chaudhuri with exegesis we aim to discover the true meaning of a statement while with deconstruction we seek to unveil a meaning that was not intended. Both attempts can be construed as closed and non-communal that encircles focus. What is kept intact is the controlling power of the reader. Participatory reading, on the contrary, allows the writer the full freedom to articulate his or her self within a wider discursive context that involves the reader. Amit Chuadhuri’s approach to Lawrence’s poetry, therefore, opens up a newer exegetical space.

Another way of saying this is to claim that Lawrence’s poems are not formally complete; they are open-ended and unfinished. There are gaps, silences, and fissures in them and the reader is forced to fill them by consulting his other poems. That is why the idea of intertextuality is so important for Chaudhuri as an analytical tool. In Lawrence’s case, certain poems have more than one version and hence the idea of an authoritative version is minimized. It makes the situation of the poem in the larger context in which intertexualities are activated unarguably paramount.

Amit Chaudhuri, as evidenced in his book Lawrence and Difference, is an insightful and close reader of poetry. He makes connections between works of literature that one did not think existed before he pointed them out. Let us for example consider the connection that Chaudhuri establishes between Lawrence’s poem 'Snake' and a passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. At first one might tend to regard it as too much of a stretch. But Chaudhuri makes his case very patiently and methodically, and I for one am persuaded by his display of points of kinship. Let us first consider the following lines from 'Snake'.

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 were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, finish him off.
And let us compare these lines with the following from Macbeth.
Lady Macbeth; Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act ad valor
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,

Tension

We find the selfsame tension in both the poem Snake and Shakespeare’s play. In addition both play on words such as king - guest - honour- very effectively. It is important to bear in mind the fact that Lawrence in one of his essays made the following comment. ‘It is almost shameful to confess that the poems which have meant most to me, line Wordsworth’s 'Ode to Immortality', Keats’ odes and pieces of Macbeth or As You Like It or Midsummer Night’s Dream….’Amit Chaudhuri makes a very good case for the impact of Macbeth in the structuring of 'Snake'. Similarly, he makes highly insightful comments regarding Lawrence’s marginality and his probing into difference as a post-colonial Indian reader of English prose and verse.

There is much more that can usefully be said about Chaudhuri’s study; unfortunately, restrictions of space do not allow such detailed investigations. What I have sought to do in my remarks on Chaudhuri’s book on Lawrence’s poetry is to underline the fact that it is one of the most perceptive studies on the subject and we in Sri Lanka can profit immensely from an examination of his thought-ways.

In these columns, whenever I discuss a Western poet, writer, critic or filmmaker it has been my practice to discuss his or her relevance to us in Sri Lanka. So adhering to that practice, let me conclude by referring to some topics that are deeply connected with our own Sri Lankan interests. Lawrence is, to be sure, no strangers to us. Some decades ago Martin Wickremasinghe wrote an important critical study on Lawrence’s mysticism comparing it with certain traditional Indian forms. In the 1960s, with the publication of Gunadasa Amarasekera’s Yali Upannemi, Lawrence attracted a great deal of attention among Sinhala readers.

And a number of his works have been translated into Sinhala. In discussing the relevance of Lawrence’s poetry for us in Sri Lanka, I wish to focus on three points. The first is the question of free verse or vers libre. D.H. Lawrence wrote a great deal of free verse some of it bad, some extremely good. Both types, negatively and positively, offer interesting insights into the dynamics of free verse.

Since the 1969s, free verse has generated a great deal of controversy among Sinhala literary critics and writers. These controversies were most acute in the 1960s. G.B. Senanayake introduced this form, and Siri Gunasinghe gave it greater currency. Some of us, in our own way, helped to further the conversation on free verse. Speaking for myself, I was a co-editor of the influential poetry magazine ‘Nisandasa’ and wrote my first book of poetry as an undergraduate; it was titled Akal Vassa and was in free verse (Interestingly, it was reviewed in a local Sinhala newspaper in mock-free verse.)During the past fifty years or so free verse has come to be accepted by the reading public. Indeed, much of the poetry now being published in Sinhala newspapers and journals belong to free verse.

Free verse

The topic of free verse constitutes a complex issue. From the nomenclature itself to the techniques associated with it , free verse has generated considerable controversy. Although in English we use the term free verse as a roomy concept, in French there is a distinction between vers libre (free verse) and vers libere (freed verse).In Sinhala, the term nisandas has been subject to diverse analyses. For example, the authoritative classical work on Sinhala prosody, The Elu Sandas Lakuna claims that there are hundreds of thousands of metrical structures. Consequently, what we term a passage of free verse may well turn out to have its own specific metrical structure that we are unaware of; that is to say, it is not, technically speaking, a passage of free verse.

Similarly, the techniques associated with free verse have become the focal point of much discussion. What Lawrence illustrates, it seems to me, is that one can be simultaneously the author of good and bad free verse. Some of his free verse compositions are prosy, lack structure and are clearly too loose and diffuse to carry poetic conviction. Others like the poem Snake that I discussed earlier exemplify the sensitive ways in which free verse can be deployed to communicate an experience laden with human meaning. Here we are brought to an enlarged awareness of the potentialities of rhythmic movements. It captures with marvelous flexibility the flow of thought and rhythms of imagination. Therefore, it is useful to pay attention to the concept of free verse; it is indeed one that has exercised a profound influence on modern Sinhala literary sensibility.

Three of the finest essays on free verse that I have read are by T.S. Eliot and Graham Hough. Eliot wrote in 1917 an essay titled Reflections on Vers Libre and in 1942 he wrote another titled, The Music of Poetry. Hough wrote an essay titled ‘Free Verse’ in the late 1950s. All three essays still resonate with discerning readers. One of the main points that Eliot makes about free verse is that it demands imagination, self-discipline and craftsmanship.

It’s not a case of chopped-up prose masquerading as poetry. As he asserts ‘as for free verse, I expressed my view 25 years ago by saying that no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job. No one has a better case to know than I that a great deal of bad prose has been written under the name of free verse’. He goes on to say that only a bad poet could welcome free verse as a freedom from form. According to him, it was a rejection of dead form and a preparation for new form or the renewal of the old. It seeks to stress the inner unity which is unique to every poem as opposed to the outer unity.

Graham Hough in his essay discusses the prestige accorded to free verse in the French tradition as opposed to the English tradition, and the complex prosody involved in, and which underwrites, much free verse. He begins the essay by asserting that for some reason the concept of free verse has never wholly naturalised itself in English the way it has in French. This despite the fact that some excellent free verse has been written by poets as diverse as T.S Eliot, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence and Edith Sitwell. Hough points out there are three features that serve to distinguish free verse from traditional verse.

First, and in many ways the most obvious, the lines are of irregular length, and that these variations in length do not answer to any pre-ordained pattern. Second, many of these lines cannot be accommodated within recognised metrical schemes; that is to say, we cannot label them iambics, trochaics, anapests and so on.

Third, rhyme is most often absent; if it does appear every now and then, it has no discernible pattern. He goes on to say that as soon as one begins to explore actual examples in fair deal, one would become aware of the fact that a great variety of effects are secured through these means.

To be continued