D.H. Lawrence: Being Alive: Selected Poems
Edited with an introduction by Margaret Elvy
D.H. Lawrence's strident and idiosyncratic evocations of sex,
touch, Spring, flowers, nature, love, black suns, fish and other
glories are gathered here in this new selection.
British Poets Series. Bibliography and notes.
D.H. Lawrence s poetry is far less known than his fiction. It is
often loose, rather than fluid, and unstructured rather than free
verse, and messy rather than well-defined. It is a poetry, as
Lawrence stresses, of the moment, a poetry in the process of
becoming, constantly dissolving.
In the Foreword to his book Pansies, he wrote of that breathless
transience, embodied for him in the life of a flower: the breath of
the moment, and one eternal moment easily contradicting the next
eternal moment. Only don t nail the pansy down. You won t keep it
any better if you do.
In the introduction to the American edition of New Poems,
Lawrence wrote:
Let me feel the mud and the heavens in my lotus. Let me feel the
heavy, silting, sucking mud, the spinning of sky winds. Let me feel
them both in purest contact, the nakedness of sucking weight,
nakedly passing radiance. Give me nothing fixed, set, static. Don t
give me the infinite or the eternal: nothing of infinity, nothing
of eternity. Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence
and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of
all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate
present, the Now. The immediate moment is not a drop of water
running downstream. It is the source and issue, the bubbling up of
the stream. Here, in this instant moment, up bubbles the stream of
time, out of the wells of futurity, flowing on to the oceans of the
past. The source, the issue, the creative quick. There is poetry of
this immediate present, instant poetry, as well as poetry of the
infinite past and the infinite future. The seething poetry of the
incarnate Now is supreme, beyond even the everlasting of the before
and after.
Lawrence s typical poetry occurs in poems such as Sicilian
Cyclamens, Snake and Snap-Dragon, longish, loose poems with a lot
space that allow Lawrence to explore his subject.
Lawrence covers a surprisingly wide range of subjects in his
poesie - far wider than, say, Robert Graves or Thomas Hardy or John
Keats. Among poets, there is no one quite like him. Like every
poet, he has his pet notions, and keeps hacking away at them: the
river of blood of the Sons and Lovers era, the democracy of touch
from Lady Chatterley s Lover, the Christological machismo of The
Plumed Serpent lyrics, the hatred of labour, the love of all things
Mediterranean, and the primacy of the body.
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