The Columbia History of British Poetry (144 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 566
between [the human] and the denial of . . . sensual animality," Bataille remarks, is "incest." Lawrence's eroticism erects itself on this prohibition. And so the mother, on whom the moon drops a cold sexual white in
Sons and Lovers
, is here less the moon (even if this last is as good as drenched in menstrual blood, terror of primitive prohibitions) than Mother Night herself; and the speaker would be her consort and son, the womb-invasive moon, sacrificially surrendered to sex and death, no Christ who drops the tomb like a soiled garment.
Can the tough membrane of the "human" be ruptured "Finally"? Must the animal in us remain always apologetic? Lawrence will not apologize. Using the language of anathema against itself, he converts it, in a familiar radical strategy, into praise. ''Southern Night" marks Lawrence's sexual acceptance of deathof life as its own blood sacrifice. Nothing could more completely subvert Western culture, which is based on denial. Elsewhere Lawrence says, "The breath of life is in the sharp winds of change / mingled with the breath of destruction." Along with Robert Graves and Ted Hughes, Lawrence is the most moon-maddened of the modern English writers, the most earnest in trying to face civilization toward its roots in the senses' sacred and furious seriousness.
Lawrence's most bravely beautiful poem of what Nietzsche called "affirmative pathos," of a Yes to sex and death, is "Pomegranate":
And, if you dare, the fissure!
Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?
Do you prefer to look on the plain side?
For all that, the setting suns are open.
The end cracks open with the beginning:
Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.
The poet adds: "For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. / It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack." (Here the rhythms and vowels are themselves kaleidoscopic.) Yeats had his own version: "Man is in love and loves what vanishes." Eros, as Bataille says, is "the tragic god."
"Pomegranate" parries two opposed ways to refuse a broken heart. First, Dionysian rendings of the finite, so as to pluck out and devour the hidden infinite:
In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek women,
No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate-trees in flower,
Oh so red, and such a lot of them.
 
Page 567
This glances at sadistic impatience with slow growth, at an intoxicated obliviousness to the beauty made possible only by change. The other refusal of the Apollonian and organic is the Christian anticipation of immortality: in Venice, "Abhorrent, green, slippery city," the pomegranates are hidden in back gardens, significantly unripe and barbed"crown of spiked green metal."
Lawrence, then, is in his own way complex; though almost entirely free of attraction to the holy, he vacillates between the organically profane and the burstingly sacredis often at points in between. His interest in Pan, as an All consonant with organic individuality, is thus understandable. He sidles, rather than dashes, toward the sacred. He holds back from Yeatsian crisis and violence; he wants the sacred as coals, not fireor as limited fire, as when, referring to peasants resting from labor at "dark" noon in "AndraitxPomegranate Flowers," he says that "from out of the foliage of the secret loins / red flamelets here and there reveal / a man, a woman."
"Southern Night" and "Pomegranate" are examples of what for Lawrence is a new kind of poemindeed, new for everyone except his mentor, Whitman. The items in these poems marshal themselves in bunches. They proceed in spasms of concentration and purpose. Attack, and again attack. In all, they combine successive proddings and insouciant poise. Structurally, they trust more profoundly than Yeats's poems do (with a few exceptions) in the spontaneous, the here-in-the-momentwhich is to say that they are more accepting of death. A species of action writing, they respond unpredictably but (as it were) naturally to some immediate provocation.
To put
Birds, Beasts and Flowers
beside Lawrence's earlier poems is to see that his work's ruling principle of growth is the movement from constriction to "the free motion of life." The formal logic of the later poems is a cinematic flow and cut, a sidestepping of the static within the limits of occasional steps back. These last not only imprint matters more deeply but toe the poem over on itself, in a self-acknowledging unity.
The new formal procedure has everything to do with the discovery of time as the "insurgent now," as also with the love and advocacy of kaleidoscopic heterogeneity, the febrile desire of metaphor, the paradox of boundless animacy, the sense of life as a gorgeous, inexhaustible resource. It is an attempt to pull alongside a surging chaos, to photograph it so that it appears almost stillnow at this moment, now at the nextbut really to be in transit, to write on the go. The poet, Lawrence
 
Page 568
thought, must have less "terror of chaos" than other people. Enemies of convention, poets make slits in the cosmos umbrella ("the chaos which we have got used to we call a cosmos"), "and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun." In any given poem, Lawrence's slit is made in a suspenseful series of little rips, all along the same line of discovery.
"Fish" goes further than the other poems in being the mimesis of the sentiment of the mother as (now) mercifully everywhere ("cast abroad," in a phrase from the end of
Sons and Lovers
). For Lawrence, poetry, wherever it turns, touches a Great Being, but never in the same place twice (or it ceases to be poetry). "Who is it ejects his sperm to the naked flood? / In the wave-mother? / Who swims enwombed?": the question carries friendly envy as well as wonder. The poem's structure emulates such unrestricted fish-bellied immediacy with the source. "The rhizome,'' Deleuze and Guattari point out in
A Thousand Plateaus
, "operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots"; it is a "short-term memory." Rhizomatic poetry is situated in various points of contact, as against contracting into "the dismal unity of an object declared lost," as did Lawrence's early verse. Such poetry carries the logic of lyricism into structure itself, beyond local wording and rhythm. Poetry becomes a body art of empathy with its creaturely subject. The model is not the syllogism, a square balanced on a rolling loss, but, instead, response-stirred physiological rufflings and rerufflings ("Turkey-Cock," incidentally, is another instance of the free-based poem). In a late work,
Apocalypse
, Lawrence says: "To appreciate the pagan manner of thought we have to drop our own manner of on-and-on-and-on, from a start to a finish, and allow the mind to move in cycles, or to flit here and there over a cluster of images."
Many of Lawrence's subsequent poems pulled back from the generosity of a maternally sanctioned mimesis. Lawrence felt drawn away from creatures to "the unknowable reality which causes us to rise into being." With a few exceptionsnotably "Bavarian Gentians"his later poems are either more harshly wiry or, at the other extreme, more mushily yearning than the best pieces of
Birds, Beasts and Flowers
. They poke and rail (sometimes effectively) or else fall (never effectively) into religious consolation: "Lift up your heads, O ye Gates! / for the silence of the last great thundrous laugh / screens us purely, and we can slip through." Lawrence's language fell, at its worst, into imaginative dullness. It lost the lust for the refreshments of chaos.

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