The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

An artist who ignores this difference between natural growth and human construction will produce the exact opposite of what he intends. He hopes to produce something which will seem as natural as a flower, but the qualities of the natural are exactly what his product will lack. A natural object never appears unfinished; if it is an inorganic object like a stone, it is what it has to be, if an organic object like a flow^Ter, what it has to be at this moment. But a similar effect—of being what it has to be—can only be achieved in a work of art by much thought, labor and care. The gesture of a ballet dancer, for example, only looks natural when, through long practice, its execution has become "second nature" to him. That perfect incarnation of life in substance, word in flesh, which in nature is immediate, has in art to be achieved and, in fact, can never be perfectly achieved. In many of Lawrence's poems, the spirit has failed to make itself a fit body to live in, a curious defect in the work of a writer who was so conscious of the value and significance of the body. In his essay on Thomas Hardy, Lawrence made some acute observations about this very problem. Speaking of the antimony between Law and Love, the Flesh and the Spirit, he says

The principle of the Law is found strongest in Woman, the principle of Love in Man. In every creature, the mobility, the law of change is found exemplified in the male, the stability, the conservatism in the female.

The very adherence of rhyme and regular rhythm is a concession to the Law, a concession to the body, to the being and requirements of the body. They are an admis­sion of the living positive inertia which is the other half of life, other than the pure will to motion.

This division of Lawrence's is a variant on the division be­tween the City and the Open Road. To the mind of the pil­grim, his journey is a succession of ever-new sights and sounds, but to his heart and legs, it is a rhythmical repetition—tic- toc, left-right—even die poetry of the Open Road must pay that much homage to the City. By his own admission and definition Lawrence's defect as an artist was an exaggerated maleness.

Reading Lawrence's early poems, one is continually struck by the originality of the sensibility and the conventionality of the expressive means. For most immature poets, their chief problem is to learn to forget what they have been taught poets are supposed to feel; too often, as Lawrence says, the young man is afraid of his demon, puts his hand over the demon's mouth and speaks for him. On the other hand, an immature poet, if he has real talent, usually begins to exhibit quite early a distinctive style of his own; however obvious the in­fluence of some older writer may be, there is something original in his manner or, at least, great technical competence. In Lawrence's case, this was not so; he learned quite soon to let his demon speak, but it took him a long time to find the appropriate style for him to speak in. All too often in his early poems, even the best ones, he is content to versify his thoughts; there is no essential relation between what he is saying and the formal structure he imposes upon it.

Being nothing, I bear the brunt

Of the nightly heavens overhead, like an immense open eye

With a cat's distended pupil, that sparkles with litde stars

And with thoughts that flash and crackle in far-off malignancy

So distant, they cannot touch me, whom nothing mars.

A mere poetaster with nothing to say, would have done some­thing about -whom nothing mars.

It is interesting to notice that the early poems in which he seems technically most at ease and the form most natural, are those he wrote in dialect.

I wish tha hadna done it, Tim,

I do, an' that I do, For whenever I look thee i'th' face, I s'll see Her face too.

I wish I could wash er ofFn thee; 'Appen I can, If I try.

But tha'll ha'e ter promise ter be true ter me Till I die.

This sounds like a living woman talking, whereas no woman on earth ever talked like this:

How did you love him, you who only roused

His mind until it burnt his heart away!

'Twas you who killed him, when you both caroused

In words and things well said. But the other way

He never loved you, never with desire

Touched you to fire.

I suspect that Lawrence's difficulties with formal verse had their origin in his linguistic experiences as a child.

My father was a working man

and a collier was he, At six in the morning they turned him down and they turned him up for tea.

My mother was a superior soul

a superior soul was she, cut out to play a superior role

in the god-damn bourgoisie.

We children were the in-betweens,

Litde non-descripts were we, In doors we called each other you outside it was tha and thee.