D .H. LAWRENCE’S POETRY: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

Though famous for his ground-breaking novels, D. H. Lawrence was also a very accomplished poet, having written over 800 verses during his relatively short life. His first poems were written in 1904, appearing in Ford Madox Ford’s new literary venture The English Review. His early poems clearly place Lawrence in the school of Georgian poets, a group not only named after the reigning monarch but also in reference to the romantic poets of the previous Georgian period, whose work they so admired. These early poems employed well-worn poetic tropes and deliberately archaic language, many displaying what John Ruskin referred to as ‘the pathetic fallacy’ — the tendency to ascribe human emotions to animals and even inanimate objects.

Lawrence’s poetry was to take a dramatic change following the First World War. His poems now adopted a free verse style, influenced by Walt Whitman. Lawrence set forth his manifesto for much of his later verse in the introduction to New Poems, where he explains:

“We 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...But we cannot positively prescribe any motion, any rhythm.”

Lawrence’s most celebrated poems are those that depict nature, such as the verses found in Birds Beasts and Flowers and Tortoises. Snake, one of his most frequently anthologised works, presents man’s modern distance from nature — a recurring theme of Lawrence’s later poetry — whilst deftly hinting at religious themes.

Although Lawrence’s later works were clearly composed in the modernist tradition, they often differed greatly to other modernist writers, which were tended to be austere in their approach, with every word being carefully worked upon in a meticulous fashion. Yet Lawrence strongly believed that all poems should be personal sentiments and that spontaneity was vital for any successful work. He titled one of his later collections of poems Pansies, partly to embody the simple and ephemeral nature of the verses.

Although the poet lived most of the last ten years of his life abroad, his thoughts were often on his homeland of England. Published in 1930, just eleven days after Lawrence’s death, his last complete collection Nettles offered a series of bitter, ‘nettling’ and wry attacks on the moral climate of England, which he had felt bound to escape earlier in his life. Following his death, two notebooks of Lawrence’s unprinted verse were posthumously published as Last Poems and More Pansies, containing two of his most famous poems about death, Bavarian Gentians and The Ship of Death, confirming the remarkable insight he had as not only a novelist, but as a poet of the highest order.

“Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!
for you will need it.
For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.”

The Ship of Death, 1930