The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

in his heart of hearts, Lawrence knew this himself. There is a sad passage in An Autobiographical Sketch:

Why is there so little contact between myself and the people I know? The answer, as far as I can see, has some­thing to do with class. As a man from the working class, I feel that the middle class cut off some of my vital vibra­tion when I am with them. I admit them charming and good people often enough, but they just stop some part of me from working.

Then, why don't I live with my own people? Because their vibration is limited in another direction. The work­ing class is narrow in outlook, in prejudice, and narrow in intelligence. This again makes a prison. Yet I find, here in Italy, for example, that I live in a certain contact with the peasants who work the land of this villa. I am not intimate with them, hardly speak to them save to say good-day. And they are not working for me. I am not their padrone. I don't want to live with them in their cot­tages; that would be a sort of prison. I don't idealise them. I don't expect them to make any millenium here on earth, neither now nor in the future. But I want them to be there, about the place, their lives going along with mine.

For the word peasants, one might substitute the words birds, beasts and flowers. Lawrence possessed a great capacity for affection and charity, but he could only direct it towards non- human life or peasants whose lives were so uninvolved with his that, so far as he was concerned, they might just as well have been nonhuman. Whenever, in his writings, he forgets about men and women with proper names and describes the anonymous life of stones, waters, forests, animals, flowers, chance traveling companions or passers-by, his bad temper and his dogmatism immediately vanish and he becomes the most enchanting companion imaginable, tender, intelligent, funny and, above all, happy. But the moment any living thing, even a dog, makes demands on him, the rage and preaching return. His poem about "Bibbles," "the wait whitmanesque love-bitch who loved just everybody," is the best poem about a dog

ever written, but it makes it clear that Lawrence was no person to be entrusted with the care of a dog.

All right, mv little bitch.

You learn loyalty rather than loving,

And I'll protect you.

To which Bibbles might, surely, with justice retort: "O for Chris-sake, mister, go get yourself an Alsatian and leave me alone, can't you."

The poems in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers are among Law­rence's longest. He was not a concise writer and he needs room to make his effect. In his poetry he manages to make a virtue out of what in his prose is often a vice, a tendency to verbal repetition. The recurrence of identical or slightly varied phrases helps to give his free verse a structure; the phrases themselves are not particularly striking, but this is as it should be, for their function is to act as stitches.

Like the romantics, Lawrence's starting point in these poems is a personal encounter between himself and some animal or flower but, unlike the romantics, he never confuses the feel­ings they arouse in him with what he sees and hears and knows about them.

Thus, he accuses Keats, very justly, I think, of being so preoccupied with his own feelings that he cannot really listen to the nightingale. Thy -plaintive anthem fades deserves Law­rence's comment: It never was a plaintive anthem—it was Caruso at his jauntiest.

Lawrence never forgets—indeed this is what he likes most about them—that a plant or an animal has its own kind of existence which is unlike and uncomprehending of man's.

It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice:

'This is your Mother, she laid you when you were an

egg-'

He does not even trouble to answer: 'Woman, what have I to do with thee?'

He wearily looks the other way,

And she even more wearily looks another way still.

C"Tortoise Family Connections.")

But watching closer

That motionless deadly motion,

That unnatural barrel body, that long ghoul nose . . . I left off hailing him.

I had made a mistake, I didn't know him, This grey, monotonous soul in the water, This intense individual in shadow, Fish-alive.

I didn't know his God.

("Fish.")

When discussing people or ideas, Lawrence is often turgid and obscure, but when, as in these poems, he is contemplating some object with love, the lucidity of his language matches the intensity of his vision, and he can make the reader see what he is saying as very few writers can.

Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs, How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air.

("The Mosquito.")

Her little loose hands, and sloping Victorian shoulders

("Kangaroo.")

There she is, perched on her manger, looking over the

boards into the day Like a belle at her window.