D.H.Lawrence and the art of poetry

[Part 1]

In my last few columns I sought to examine the nature and significance of Pablo Neruda’s poetry. Neruda spent some time in Sri Lanka. Similarly, D.H. Lawrence, too, spent some time in Sri Lanka and some of his letters to friends as well as his poems refer to his Sri Lankan experience.

Let me begin by quoting from a letter he wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith. Lawrence was a restless traveller who never found contentment in the lands he visited. He was after some ineffable and mysterious life that he never found; it was always beyond his emotional reach. Sri Lanka was no exception. He was disappointed by what he saw in the island.

In a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, he said that, ‘I didn’t like Ceylon- at least I liked looking at it – but not to live in.’ He said that the east was not for him. He went on to say that, ‘the sensuous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black bottomless, hopeless eyes – and the heads of elephants and buffaloes poking out of primeval mud – the queer noise of tall metallic palm trees; ach1 –altogether the tropics have something of the world before the Flood – hot dark mud and the life inherent in it; makes me feel rather sick.’

Kandy Perahera

Clearly, he was disappointed with what he saw and heard here; however, he found the Kandy Perahera to be a fascinating spectacle. This is how he described it in the letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, with the Prince of Wales in attendance..

D.H. Lawrence

‘The perahera wonderful – midnight – huge elephants, great flares of coconut torches, princes like peg-tops swathed round and round with muslin – and then tom-toms and savage music and devil dances – phase after phase – and that lonely little white fish of a prince up soft – and the black eyes and black bright sweating bodies of the naked dancers under the torches – and the clanging of great mud-born elephants roaring past – made an enormous impression on me –a glimpse into the world before the Flood.

Lawrence wrote an interesting poem titled ‘Elephant’ based on his experience of watching the Kandy perahera. (At that time, he lived at the Lake View Estate in Kandy.)

To be sure, it is not among his most accomplished poems; however, it displays some of his characteristic interests and strengths as well as weaknesses as a poet. The poem is longish and somewhat diffuse. This is how it begins.

You go down shade to the river, where naked men sit on
flat brown rocks, to watch the ferry, in the sun;
And you cross the ferry with the naked people, go up the
tropical lane
Through the palm-trees and past hollow paddy-fields where
naked men are threshing rice
And the monolithic water-buffaloes, like old, muddy stones
with hair on them, are being idle;
And through the shadow of bread-fruit trees, with their
Dark green, glossy, fanged eaves
Very handsome, and pure yellow fanged leaves;
Out into the open, where the path runs on the top of
dyke between paddy-fields;
And there, of course, you meet a huge and mid-grey
elephant advancing his frontal bone. His trunk curled
round a log of wood
So you step down the bank, to make way.

This description has the characteristic Laurentian strengths of acuity of observation and ability to capture sights and sounds through vibrant language. The poem may be diffuse but beneath the looseness there is also a recognizable unity of tone and mode, of person and place. This is how Lawrence describes the perahera.

The elephant bells striking slow, tong-tong, tong-tong
To music and queer chanting;
Enormous shadow-procession filing in the flare of fire
In the fume of coco-nut oil, in the sweating topical night,
In the noise of the tom-toms and singers;
Elephants after elephants curl their trunks, vast shadows.
And some cry out..

Signature feature

Lawrence’s signature feature, both positive and negative, such as the fluid awareness of the environs, fineness of perception and his capacity to catch it in his physically-charged verbal net and his repetitiveness are evident in this poem.

His ability to retrieve familiar perceptions from unfamiliar contexts instinct with life is clearly present in the verbal fabric. He is most persuasive when his mind has been set in an antagonistic motion by some recalcitrant event. I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Lawrence as a poet later.

David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. His father was a miner and his mother a middle-class woman. Their social disparity finds expression in some of his fiction.

He studied at Nottingham University College. At the age of 26 he published his first novel titled the White Peacock. It was published only a few weeks after his mother’s death; he was very close to her.

He started working as a schoolteacher but he had to end it as he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. This disease ultimately led to his death.

D.H. Lawrence, in 1912, eloped to Germany with Freda Weekley; she was the German wife of his former German language tutor. Two years later they were married. She had a great influence on his life as well as literary output. He now was making a living as a writer. His two outstanding novels the Rainbow and Women in Love were written in 1915 and 1916 respectively. The former was suppressed while he had great difficulty in obtaining a publisher for the latter.

Lawrence was deeply unhappy with the industrial western civilization which he saw as thwarting the natural instincts of men and women. Consequently, he travelled to various locations such as Sicily, Sri Lanka, Australia and New Mexico. He was a highly gifted travel writer and his experiences in these countries are wonderfully caught in his vigorous prose in his travel writings. His last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was at the centre of a far-reaching controversy. It was banned in 1928. At the relatively young age of forty-four he died in Venice having succumbed to tuberculosis. Lawrence’s life may have been relatively short. But he produced an astonishingly large body of work – novels, short stories, plays, poems, travel books, critical essays, translations and copious letters. It is indeed as a novelist that he continues to enjoy the widest reputation. Subsequent to his death, his wife, Freda, who was extremely sensitive in literary matters expressed the view that, ‘what he had seen and felt and known he gave in his writing to his fellow men, the splendour of living, the hope of more and more life.’ He went on to say that it was a heroic and immeasurable gift. This statement, in many ways, encapsulates an important aspect of his achievement.

As I stated earlier, it is as a novelist that he is most well-known. His novels such as Sons and Lovers, Women in Love and The Rainbow – which in my judgment are his finest works – attest to his indubitable gifts as a novelist. F.R. Leavis, who was a tireless champion of Lawrence and who wrote one of the most influential books on Lawrence’s novels had this to say. ‘Lawrence is before all else a great novelist, one of the very greatest, and it is as one of the major novelists of the English tradition that he will above all live.’ He went on to assert that Lawrence’s insight was penetrating and clear, and he was superbly intelligent. It was his conviction that the strongest difficulty we experience in coming to terms with his art is that there is a certain resistance, an antipathy, to what he wishes to proclaim..This resistance is associated with habit. Here, it seems to me, Leavis is calling attention to an important aspect of Lawrence’s writings.

D.H. Lawrence once remarked that, ‘a critic must be emotionally alive in every fibre, intellectually capable, and skillful

in essential logic, and then morally honest.’ This proposition needs to be borne in mind as we approach Lawrence’s writings, prose and verse. For example, when we examine a poem such as Elephant from which I selected some passages earlier, we need to have before us the critical desiderata that Lawrence is holding up for our approbation and guidance.

Although Lawrence is better known as a novelist than a poet, it was as a poet that he first entered the world of creative literature; it was poetry that initially drew him towards a career in literature. Lawrence is the author of a substantial body of poetry,( he wrote nearly a thousand poems), although ninety percent of it can be dismissed as less than satisfactory. However, to my mind, the power and the beauty of the remaining ten percent is sufficient for him to lay claim to being a poet of the highest rank. Commenting on the selected poems of Lawrence published by penguin, the distinguished British literary critic A. Alvarez said, ‘I think the poem is very fine indeed, with a fineness of perception and development that was always Lawrence’s, and an originality that makes them as important as any poetry of or time. For their excellence comes from something that is at its best, and now, in the 1950s well-nigh lost: a complete truth to feeling. Lawrence is the foremost emotional realist of the century.’

Alvarez agrees that Lawrence wrote too much verse and much of it bad. However, he said that ‘even his badness is the badness of genius.’ The editor of Penguin Selected Poems of Lawrence said that in Lawrence’s poetry one observes the way in which events and crises of life are encapsulated with remarkable intensity of feeling, and that as he ripened as a poet he began to annex larger themes for his poetry. He said that, ‘of these the most insistent was his belief that civilization had corrupted the natural behaviour of men and women, and that physical fulfilment was the clue to the recovery of human dignity and happiness.’ He says that beneath the varnish of civilization and social convention, he perceived, there was a true picture of human behaviour as God originally made it, and Lawrence’s vocation was to clean and restore this true image.

To be continued