Birds, Beasts and Flowers

"Lawrence’s poetry evolved considerably, stylistically, over his lifetime. In the Collected Poems that he published in 1928, he divided his poems into rhyming and unrhyming poems. Even his unrhyming poems are approachable. They are not as spikily modernist as those of T S Eliot, for example. Nevertheless, one should be on one’s guard and not patronise them, because they can be trickier than one might initially think. Two periods of his poetry stand out to me. One is that of Birds, Beasts and Flowers , which is from 1923, and the other is that his late poems, collected in Pansies (1929), Nettles (1930), and Late Poems (1933). “A lot of this poetry is bad-tempered, but some is extremely moving, brave and wise” What I like in the late poems is his awareness of his mortality: he was dying quite rapidly whilst writing them. A lot of this poetry is bad-tempered, but some is extremely moving, brave and wise. From a more conventional literary standard, I think the most successful of his volumes of poetry is Birds, Beasts and Flowers . He divides this collection into sections called things like ‘Fruits’, ‘Trees’, ‘Flowers’, ‘The Evangelistic Beasts’, ‘Creatures’, ‘Reptiles’, ‘Birds’, and ‘Animals’. It is to this poetry that those interested in the eco-critical aspect of Lawrence often refer. Here you find what might be described as his ‘flat ontology’: his placing of human and nonhuman life on the same plane. A particularly important poem in this regard is ‘Fish’, where he repeats the line ‘I didn’t know his God’. It is a poem about the limits of human comprehension of something nonhuman. The speaker acknowledges these limits, while also being willing to make an effort of empathy. There are wonderful lines when the speaker captures the fish and holds it in his hand: ‘And I, a many-fingered horror of daylight to him, / Have made him die’. In the ‘Reptile’ section, he has a stunning sequence of poems about tortoises. It is very apparent that he has watched tortoises up close for some time and, within the limits of human comprehension, has come quite some way in understanding them. But he also projects a whole human mythology onto them. He likens the male tortoise at the point of orgasm both to Osiris and to the crucified Christ. For the relationship between humans and animals—and also as an example of Lawrence’s humour—I would suggest ‘Man and Bat’. This poem is about Lawrence trying to capture a bat that has got into his hotel room in daylight. The bat eventually escapes him and is, in a way, superior to him. There is a similar theme in ‘Snake’, the most famous and most anthologised of his poems. I would also recommend two great late poems about death, ‘Shadows’ and ‘The Ship of Death’. In particular, I find ‘The Ship of Death’, which was influenced by his knowledge of Egyptian theology, very moving. Lawrence wrote openly about death as well as about sex. He liked the idea of a journey. When the Egyptians buried someone, they sent them on a journey. This is why they had to provide them with food and clothes, for their passage to the underworld. He advises us in ‘The Ship of Death’ to build our ship of death. He turns the dead Egyptians into metaphor. He says that we will need a spiritual bark with which to cross the oblivion which follows death. But he says that there is a far side to the shore. Gradually, out of darkness, this other side appears. If you get into Lawrence, then you do need to read them. Responses to them vary. I reject the strongest accusations that have been made against Lawrence on the counts of fascism or proto-fascism. Most notoriously, Bertrand Russell claimed in 1953 that his ideas ‘led straight to Auschwitz’. In Lawrence’s defence, context has to be taken into account. The Overton window (as it is known) of what it is politically permissible to think, was vastly wider in Lawrence’s time than it had been in the Victorian period, and than it is now. More importantly, we should note that in politics (as in other respects) Lawrence was experimental. He conducted thought experiments in his novels. He sent his characters into quasi-fascist movements—one in Australia and another in Mexico. But eventually, he has them take the measure of these organisations, and reject them. It is certain that Lawrence would have abhorred Nazism; he died in 1930, before the Nazi party came to power in Germany. But he was extremely critical of Italian Fascism, under which he lived in the 1920s. This was self-avowedly a Roman-revivalist movement. After the leadership novels, he wrote Sketches of Etruscan Places , which paints Etruscan civilisation as superior to the Roman civilisation that wiped it out. He portrayed the Etruscans as non-bullying, gentler, and happier. This was a loud political statement to be making in Fascist Italy."