The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence

Instead of bewailing a lost youth, a man nowadays begins to wonder, when he reaches my ripe age of forty-two, if ever his past will subside and be comfortably bygone. Doing over these poems makes me realize that my teens and my twenties are just as much me, here and now and present, as ever they were, and that pastness is only an abstraction. The actuality, the body of feeling, is essentially alive and here.

And I remember the slightly self-conscious Sunday afternoon, when I was nineteen, and I “composed” my first two “poems.” One was to “Guelder-roses,” and one to “Campions,” and most young ladies would have done better: at least I hope so. But I thought the effusions very nice, and so did Miriam.

Then much more vaguely I remember subsequent half-furtive moments when I would absorbedly scribble at verse for an hour or so, and then run away from the act and the production as if it were secret sin. It seems to me that “knowing oneself” was a sin and a vice for innumerable centuries, before it became a virtue. It seems to me, it is still a sin and vice, when it comes to new knowledge. In those early days — for I was very green and unsophisticated at twenty — I used to feel myself at times haunted by something, and a little guilty about it, as if it were an abnormality. Then the haunting would get the better of me, and the ghost would suddenly appear, in the shape of a usually rather incoherent poem. Nearly always I shunned the apparition once it had appeared. From the first, I was a little afraid of my real poems — not my “compositions,” but the poems that had the ghost in them. They seemed to me to come from somewhere, I didn’t quite know where, out of a me whom I didn’t know and didn’t want to know, and to say things I would much rather not have said: for choice. But there they were. I never read them again. Only I gave them to Miriam, and she loved them, or she seemed to. So when I was twenty-one, and went to Nottingham University as a day-student, I began putting them down in a little college note-book, which was the foundation of the poetic me. Sapienliae Urbs Conditur, it said on the cover. Never was anything less true. The city is founded on a passionate unreason.

To this day, I still have the uneasy haunted feeling, and would rather not write most of the things I do write — including this Note.

Only now I know my demon better, and, after bitter years, respect him more than my other, milder and nicer self. Now I no longer like my “compositions.” I once thought the poem “Flapper” a little masterpiece: when I was twenty: because the demon isn’t in it. And I must have burnt many poems that had the demon fuming in them. The fragment “Discord in Childhood” was a long poem, probably was good, but I destroyed it. Save for Miriam, I perhaps should have destroyed them all. She encouraged my demon. But alas, it was me, not he, whom she loved. So for her too it was a catastrophe. My demon is not easily loved: whereas the ordinary me is. So poor Miriam was let down. Yet in a sense, she let down my demon, till he howled. And there it is. And no more past in me than my blood in my toes or my nose.

I have tried to arrange the poems in chronological order: that is, in the order in which they were written. The first are either subjective, or Miriam poems. “The Wild Common” was very early and very confused. I have rewritten some of it, and added some, till it seems complete. It has taken me twenty years to say what I started to say, incoherently, when I was nineteen, in this poem. The same with “Virgin Youth,” and others of the subjective poems with the demon fuming in them smokily. 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.

The poems to Miriam, at least the early ones like “Dog-Tired” and “Cherry-Robbers” and “Renascence,” are not much changed. But some of the later ones had to be altered, where sometimes the hand of commonplace youth had been laid on the mouth of the demon. It is not for technique these poems are altered: it is to say the real say.

Other verses, those I call the imaginative, or fictional, like “Love on the Farm” and “Wedding Morn,” I have sometimes changed to get them into better form, and take out the dead bits. It took me many years to learn to play with the form of a poem: even if I can do it now. But it is only in the less immediate, the more fictional poems that the form has to be played with. The demon, when he’s really there, makes his own form willy-nilly, and is unchangeable.

The poems to Miriam run into the first poems to my mother. Then when I was twenty-three, I went away from home for the first time, to the south of London. From the big new red school where I taught, we could look north and see the Crystal Palace: to me, who saw it for the first time, in lovely autumn weather, beautiful and softly blue on its hill to the north. And past the school, on an embankment, the trains rushed south to Brighton or to Kent. And round the school the country was still only just being built over, and the elms of Surrey stood tall and noble. It was different from the Midlands.

Then began the poems to Helen, and all that trouble of “Lilies in the Fire”: and London, and school, a whole new world. Then starts the rupture with home, with Miriam, away there in Nottinghamshire. And gradually the long illness, and then the death of my mother; and in the sick year after, the collapse of Miriam, of Helen, and of the other woman, the woman of “Kisses in the Train” and “The Hands of the Betrothed.”

Then, in that year, for me everything collapsed, save the mystery of death, and the haunting of death in life. I was twenty-five, and from the death of my mother, the world began to dissolve around me, beautiful, iridescent, but passing away substanceless. Till I almost dissolved away myself, and was very ill: when I was twenty- six.

Then slowly the world came back: or I myself returned: but to another world. And in 1912, when I was still twenty-six, the other phase commenced, the phase of Look! We Have Come Through’. — when I left teaching, and left England, and left many other things, and the demon had a new run for his money.

But back in England during the war, there are the War poems from the little volume: Bay. These, beginning with “Tommies in the Train,” make up the end of the volume of Rhyming Poems. They are the end of the cycle of purely English experience, and death experience.

The first poems I had published were “Dreams Old” and “Dreams Nascent,” which Miriam herself sent to Ford Madox Hueffer, in 1910, I believe, just when the English Review had started so brilliantly. Myself, I had offered the little poem “Study” to the Nottingham University Magazine, but they returned it. But Hueffer accepted the “Dreams” poems for the English Review, and was very kind to me, and was the first man I ever met who had a real and a true feeling for literature. He introduced me to Edward Garnett, who, somehow, introduced me to the world. How well I remember the evenings at Garnett’s house in Kent, by the log fire. And there I wrote the best of the dialect poems. I remember Garnett disliked the old ending to “Whether or Not.” Now I see he was right, it was the voice of the commonplace me, not the demon. So I have altered it. And there again, those days of Hueffer and Garnett are not past at all, once I recall them. They were good to the demon, and the demon is timeless. But the ordinary meal-time me has yesterdays.

And that is why I have altered “Dreams Nascent,” that exceedingly funny and optimistic piece of rhymeless poetry which Ford Hueffer printed in the English Review, and which introduced me to the public. The public seemed to like it. The M.P. for schoolteachers said I was an ornament to the educational system, whereupon I knew it must be the ordinary me which had made itself heard, and not the demon. Anyhow, I was always uneasy about it.

There is a poem added to the second volume, which had to be left out of Look! We Have Come Through! when that book was first printed, because the publishers objected to mixing love and religion, so they said, in the lines:

But I hope I shall find eternity With my face down buried between her breasts. . . But surely there are many eternities, and one of them Adam spends with his face buried and at peace between the breasts of Eve: just as Eve spends one of her eternities with her face hidden in the breast of Adam. But the publishers coughed out that gnat, and I was left wondering, as usual.

Some of the poems in Look! are rewritten, but not many, not as in the first volume. And Birds, Beasts and Flowers are practically untouched. They are what they are. They are the same me as wrote “The Wild Common,” or “Renascence.”

Perhaps it may seem bad taste to write this so personal foreword. But since the poems are so often personal themselves, and hang together in a life, it is perhaps only fair to give the demon his body of mere man, as far as possible.