The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – D. H. Lawrence

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1: Modern Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

A real pioneer in his day, his stuff can seem rather silly now. I never really got into his novels, although my dad tells stories about how, as a youth, he (and his friends) would flip through them, looking only for the dirty parts. Kind of like me with Forever, by Judy Blume. Ahem.

Some of his poems I ADORE – especially the dreaded anthropomorphizing ones (about the sparrow, the one about elephants being slow to mate) … He finds a metaphor in animal behavior which can sometimes end up in incredibly moving results. I know anthropomorphization drives some people batty, but I think those people need to get a life. Aren’t there bigger things to worry about than people projecting their feelings and wishes and hopes onto animals? Lawrence’s animal poems are his best. Granted, I haven’t read them all, so I am open to persuasion.

There’s a lot of what I would call balderdash in his poetry. Like, it is very difficult to not roll your eyes at all that mystical commingling and yearning phalluses and etc. Yeah, we get it, sex is wonderful, we all love to do it. But there’s also something really intellectual about Lawrence – he’s not really a libertine, not at all … and so his sex stuff can seem rather labored, like … he’s just thinking about it too damn much. I realize that I say this from the comfy confines of the 21st century and I certainly give him the props for pushing the boundaries of what could be said, what would be allowed to be said, and all that. His books were controversial for decades, and you read them now and you wonder, “Good lord, what is all the fuss about.” He’s not a down-and-dirty Henry Miller type of guy. He’s more airy-fairy than that … and that’s where the rolling-eyes comes in.

I know that Whitman was his main inspiration and you can hear Whitman ringing through the lines of Lawrence. That same high-arched ceiling of SELF SELF SELF … the awareness of the transcendence of the soul, embodied in the actual FLESH … all of that. But for some reason, Whitman’s poems just have more … staying power, to use a sexual phrase (a propos in this case).

I don’t know much about Lawrence but I do know that he was married to a kind of extraordinary wild woman named Frieda, who was a proponent of the “zipless fuck” decades before Erica Jong came along. Here they are together.

I mean, is that not a brilliant photo?

Tennessee Williams was obsessed with D.H. Lawrence and worked on many plays over his life that had to do with Lawrence and his wife. Some are one-acts, some unfinished full-lengths … and I know he made a pilgrimage to New Mexico, I believe, on one of his early cross-country journeys, to meet the Lawrences, hoping to get their blessing for his project. You can hear the influence of Lawrence on Tennessee Williams. I think Lawrence may very well be a man of his time and his time only (although, like I said, I am open to persuasion) … but he casts a very long shadow, and you can hear echoes of his work in other writers even today.

The Beats were influenced by Lawrence. They liked the sense they got from his poems of going “into a zone”, where the connections can fly freely and not just literally – where you can “riff”. You can see why the Beat guys were drawn to him, with quotes like this one from 1908:

“My verses are tolerable – rather pretty, but not suave; there is some blood in them. Poetry now a days seems to be a sort of plaster-cast craze, scraps sweetly moulded in easy Plaster of Paris sentiment. Nobody chips verses earnestly out of the living rock of his own feeling … Before everything I like sincerity, and a quickening spontaneous emotion. I do not worship music or the ‘half said thing’.”

It was Allen Ginsberg who said “first thought best thought” and that’s kind of what Lawrence is getting at here.

Here’s one of Lawrence’s animal poems. I post this because I like it, and I post it because it goes with the “Rikki Tikki Tavi” theme around here these days.

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.