D. H. Lawrence

 

SELECTED POEMS

Edited with an Introduction by
James Fenton

Introduction

It is possible today, given the resources of the Internet, to put together a collection of early editions of Lawrence’s poetry without spending an enormous amount of money. Such a set will probably not be complete (the rarest volume, Bay, costs a few thousand pounds), and it may have to include reprints and tatty old library copies, but it can be done, and this was my approach in re-reading Lawrence’s poetry for this selection. It was one way of seeing things afresh, to go back to the books as they first appeared.

What a poet does with his work as he goes along, what he publishes, what he holds back or fails to publish, the way he shapes an individual collection – all this can contribute to our sense of his development. And so it is that most of the poems here are selected from the individual collections made during Lawrence’s lifetime, and they are printed in the order in which they occur in these collections. The posthumous poems are printed in the order in which they first appeared in Last Poems.

However, the texts of all the poems are as established by the Complete Poems, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (London: Heinemann, 1964, corr. 1971) – that is, they appear in their final revised form, where applicable. In doing so, I take the opposite course from Keith Sagar in his 1972 Penguin Selected Poems. Sagar saw in Lawrence’s revisions ‘a kind of ventriloquism, with the voice of the mature Lawrence speaking, sometimes grotesquely, through the mouth of the dumb young man’, so he avoided the revised versions ‘even when the poems are improved, which is not always’. But the elder Lawrence (and he was never that much elder, dying at the age of forty-four) was quite clear in his mind that he was the same person who had written the original poems, and that he was at liberty to change them. This seems such a characteristic belief that I am very reluctant to go against it.

The resultant editorial approach may not be perfectly satisfactory, but at least it gives the reader some sense of what kind of work Lawrence was collecting and bringing before the public at different stages of his life. Breaking down the groups of poems in this way will also, I hope, make this selection more readable as a whole for those who, like me, have a distaste for reading lyric poetry in very large chunks. And it will perhaps put less emphasis on the distinction which Lawrence himself introduced in the two-volume Collected Poems of 1928, and which the Complete Poems preserves, between Rhyming Poems and Unrhyming Poems.

Readers who approached Lawrence’s poetry through either the Collected or the Complete Poems would inevitably get the impression that, once he had found his voice in free verse during the composition of Look! We Have Come Through! there was no turning back. He had thrown off the shackles of tradition, and found himself. The reader, on the other hand, who looks at the history of the individual volumes (see p. xxv) will find that Look! We Have Come Through! lies midway between the four early volumes collected as Rhyming Poems. And of course it contains rhyming poems of its own. Nor did Lawrence ever entirely abandon rhyme.

Chance has its role in any poet’s publishing life. It is often by chance that we come upon an editor or a publisher’s reader prepared to see virtue in our work. Lawrence had the luck to engage the interest and sympathy of Walter de la Mare, who chose and ordered most of the poems that appeared in his first volume, Love Poems and Others (1913). Lawrence was not only happy with such an arrangement – he even invited de la Mare to make his own corrections to the text. But he also seems to have added poems that de la Mare had marked ‘doubtful’.

Amores and New Poems, and to a lesser extent Bay, contain overlapping material, if arranged according to what Lawrence tells us was their order of composition (the order in which they are set out in Collected Poems). One feels this most when reading New Poems: Lawrence had old work still uncollected in his bottom drawer, and he perhaps rather padded out that volume. But still, it was work he wished to publish, and about which he made his editorial decisions as that volume was being prepared for press.

A small surprise, for the British reader, on looking at the way the poems were collected in Lawrence’s lifetime, is to discover that Tortoises appeared first in the United States as a volume on its own. It never did so in Britain, and we are accustomed to finding these poems, along with the famous ‘Snake’, in the ‘Reptiles’ section of Birds, Beasts and Flowers. An American edition of that collection, published by the Black Sparrow Press in 1992, excludes the tortoise poems altogether (without mentioning the fact), because it is following the American first edition.

It seemed to me that there would be no harm in reprinting Tortoises in full, showing the sequence as a harbinger of the style and manner of the Birds, Beasts and Flowers – Lawrence’s classic achievement. And it seemed, conversely, that there was nothing worth reprinting (for a selection such as this) in the 1930 pamphlet, Nettles, which Lawrence’s posthumous editor, Richard Aldington, called ‘about the worst and most trivial thing he ever published’.

The collections called Pansies and More Pansies are another matter. The first was published in Lawrence’s lifetime, the title being intended as a reference to the French word pensées – thoughts. These are very free jottings and epigrams, together with light rhyming poems, a few of them in dialect. Many of the short poems overlap in subject, and one is at liberty to pick and choose. More Pansies was the title given by Richard Aldington after Lawrence’s death in 1930 to the ‘occasional pieces’ he found in what he called ‘MS. B’. The poems he found in ‘MS. A’ were ‘of a different character, more pondered and soignés’: he called them ‘Last Poems’ and he placed them first in the volume of that title, no doubt with the intention of showing Lawrence at his best, for forty-odd pages, before asking the reader to work through eighty-odd pages of ‘More Pansies’. Aware of Lawrence’s ill health and irritated state of mind in his last years, Aldington wrote:

It seems to me that nearly all of these Pansies and Nettles came out of Lawrence’s nerves, and not out of his real self. They are one long hammer, hammer, hammer of exasperation. Sometimes they are like the utterances of a little Whitman, but without Walt’s calm sostenuto quality; and sometimes they are like a little Blake raving, but without the fiery vision. Yet it is always Lawrence speaking, even in the most disconcertingly trivial or spiteful, but to me at least very much the Lawrence of off days, the Lawrence one could most easily do without. I don’t say this of all the Pansies, but of a good many, and certainly of all the Nettles.

Note the qualification. Some of the Pansies tempt us to laugh at their exasperation:

Any woman who says to me
—Do you really love me?—
Earns my undying detestation.

But the poem makes its point, and the point is characteristically Lawrentian. And who else but Lawrence would have thought it important to address the subject of impotence and the dying of desire, or done so with such quiet philosophy as we find in ‘Basta!’?

When a man can love no more
and feel no more
and desire has failed
and the heart is numb

then all he can do
is to say: It is so!
I’ve got to put up with it
and wait.

This is a pause, how long a pause I know not,
in my very being.

This is worth having and keeping. Indeed, the works gathered under the rubric of ‘Pansies’ are always worth having, in the sense that a major writer’s notebooks are worth having. There is repetition and overlap, yes. But none of this will offend us as long as we acknowledge the nature of the material we are dealing with.

Lawrence himself did offend during his lifetime, and even after his death in 1930. One might have thought that a brief truce might have been observed, but when E. M. Forster called Lawrence ‘the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation’, the magazine in which he did so, the Nation and Athenaeum, received a letter from T. S. Eliot asking Forster to explain what he meant by ‘greatest’, ‘imaginative’ and ‘novelist’. Forster’s reply, that Eliot had entangled him in a web but that, on such occasions, he would rather be a fly than a spider, was well put.

It didn’t deter Eliot, though. In the next year, hailing what he considered a brilliantly destructive piece of criticism by John Middleton Murry, Eliot agrees with Murry that Lawrence was not a ‘pure artist’, in the sense, as Eliot puts it, that ‘he never succeeded in making a work of art’. ‘The false prophet’, says Eliot, ‘kills the true artist.’ Eliot’s conflicting feelings about Lawrence in these years immediately after his death can be seen in the last of the lectures collected in After Strange Gods, where Eliot acknowledges Lawrence as ‘a very much greater genius, if not a greater artist, than Hardy’. This apparent concession does not represent a change of position. Lawrence is still, to Eliot, lacking in the kind of education that would have given him a respect for ‘orthodoxy’: ‘The point is that Lawrence started life wholly free from any restriction of tradition or institution, that he had no guidance except the Inner Light, the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity.’

What disturbs and offends Eliot is Lawrence’s spirituality: ‘The man’s vision is spiritual, but spiritually sick,’ he says. Indeed the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover seems to Eliot to have been ‘a very sick man indeed’. He later modified this view (and he was ready to defend the publication of Lady Chatterley in the courtroom, if called on to do so), but it dominates his assessment of Lawrence at the time. The work is sick, and will appeal ‘to the sick and debile and confused; and will appeal not to what remains of health in them, but to their sickness’. That he is talking mainly about the novels does not alter the fact that Eliot’s disapproval of Lawrence as a whole affected the estimation of his poems.

Indeed, one of Lawrence’s adversarial critics, R. P. Blackmur, having quoted the concluding lines of ‘Tortoise Shout’, suggests in a footnote that the reader compare them with the passage in Ash Wednesday beginning ‘Lady of silences’. ‘As a restorative’, says Blackmur, ‘to the sense of controlled hysteria.’ Eliot’s poetry is here being offered as a cure for the very ‘debile’ condition Eliot detected in Lawrence’s readers.

Blackmur’s essay on ‘D. H. Lawrence and Expressive Form’ (1954), undoubtedly influential in its time, reads very curiously today. The poet’s work is

written out of a tortured Protestant sensibility and upon the foundations of an incomplete, uncomposed mind: a mind without defenses against the material with which it builds, and therefore at every point of stress horribly succumbing to it. Webster, Swift, Blake, and Coleridge – perhaps Donne, Sterne, and Shelley, and on a lesser plane Marston, Thompson (of the Dreadful Night), and Beddoes – these exemplify, in their different ways, the deracinated, unsupported imagination, the mind for which, since it lacked rational structure sufficient to its burdens, experience was too much. Their magnitude was inviolate, and we must take account of it not only for its own sake but also to escape its fate; it is the magnitude of ruins – and the ruins for the most part of an intended life rather than an achieved art.

How bracing to be told that Donne’s work is a great ruin, and that Swift, Blake and Sterne ‘intended’ their lives, rather than achieved their art. How salutary to be warned to escape such fates as these.

Blackmur’s intention was to deny Lawrence what the poet referred to as his demon, by which he meant his authentic inner voice. Lawrence, in the Foreword to the 1928 Collected Poems (see p. 191), describes how, in his youth, he had been afraid to listen to such a voice, as if knowing oneself were a ‘sin and a vice’. Sometimes in his early poems ‘the hand of commonplace youth had been laid on the mouth of the demon’ – that is, he had stifled his inner voice. But this voice continued to speak to him: ‘To the demon, the past is not past. The wild common, the gorse, the virgin youth are here and now, the same: the same me, the same one experience. Only now perhaps I can give it more complete expression.’ Revising his poems was for Lawrence a matter of listening to the demon: ‘It is not for technique these poems are altered: it is to say the real say.’

Within this, as I said above, characteristic Lawrentian view, Blackmur detects a ‘fallacy of faith in expressive form’, the faith that ‘if a thing is only intensely enough felt its mere expression in words will give it satisfactory form, the dogma, in short, that once material becomes words it is its own best form.’ But Lawrence was not saying that it was enough to feel intensely and the words would follow. He was saying that in what he wrote he tried to be true to his demon, to his most intense, even if least attractive, feelings. In early poems he had not always succeeded in this. But he still knew what those feelings had been, and so he was ready and entitled to revise in the direction of authenticity.

In addition to the 1928 Foreword, there is also the introduction Lawrence wrote to the American edition of New Poems (1918). This is an oddly misplaced document, as Lawrence himself acknowledges, since it should really have accompanied Look! We Have Come Through!, being a defence of the free verse of that volume, but it was asked for by the American publisher for copyright reasons, in order to make the American edition of New Poems significantly different from the English one. It is here that Lawrence expresses his radical view of free verse, asserting that it is,

or should be, direct utterance from the instant, whole man. It is the soul and the mind and body surging at once, nothing left out.

They speak all together. There is some confusion, some discord. But the confusion and the discord only belong to the reality as noise belongs to the plunge of water.

Free verse, as one would expect, acknowledges no laws, and toes no melodic line. Lawrence is not, however, describing automatic writing. Just as Whitman pruned away clichés of phrase and perhaps of rhythm, so the writer of free verse

can get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound or sense. We can break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to force our utterance. We can break the stiff neck of habit. We can be in ourselves spontaneous and flexible as flame, we can see that utterance rushes out without artificial foam or artificial smoothness. But we cannot positively prescribe any motion, any rhythm. All the laws we invent or discover—it amounts to pretty much the same—will fail to apply to free verse. They will only apply to some form of restricted, limited unfree verse.

I call this view radical, but it really only involves an insistence that, when we write about free verse, we say what we mean, that we do not smuggle into our definition the kind of surreptitious iambics, sloppy unrhymed sonnets or other half-measures that sometimes pose as free. Lawrence’s free verse is free to some purpose. It is powerfully mimetic, and what it imitates is the surge of the passions, the motions of thought, the rush of the perceptions. ‘Man and Bat’ is a good example of this poetic philosophy at work – the subject is ideally suited to the medium: while the bat is in the room, there is going to be chaos; it is as if the poem can only end when Lawrence has won his fight with the creature. This fight could only have taken place in free verse.

Traditional poetic practice had received severer knocks before Lawrence burst into free verse, and it has done so since. Like his mentor Whitman before him, Lawrence always aims for clarity of meaning. There is no sense of, for instance, a disintegrating consciousness or a very short attention-span. Lawrence has a purpose in writing, and that purpose is usually quite close to the surface. He is not a riddler or a puzzler. He is not highly allusive. If we decide to say he is a Modernist, since he certainly belongs to that generation, then we have to be clear that the house of Modernism has many mansions. But Auden’s conclusion (welcoming Lawrence’s late light verse) that ‘Parnassus has many mansions’ seems a better, more general, way of putting things. Lawrence’s wholesale adaptation of Whitman for his own purposes was unusual in its day, but has since been repeated with a different kind of success. There is a Whitman tradition, and there is no reason to suppose that it will not continue to be fruitful.

Faber Book of Modern Verse