The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

It has always seemed to me that a real thought, not an argument can only exist in verse, or in some poetic form. There is a didactic element about prose thoughts which makes them repellent, slightly bullying, "He who hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune." There is a point well put: but immediately it irritates by its assertiveness. If it were put into poetry, it would not nag at us so practically. We don't want to be nagged at.

(Preface to "Pansies.")

Though I personally love good prose aphorisms, I can see what Lawrence means. If one compares

Phis qa change, phis cest la meme chose

with

The accursed power that stands on Privelege

And goes with Women and Champagne and Bridge

Broke, and Democracy resumed her reign

That goes with Bridge and Women and Champagne

the first does seem a bit smug and a bit abstract, while, in the second, the language dances and is happy.

The bourgeois produced the Bolshevist inevitably As every half-truth at length produces the contradiction

of itself In the opposite half-truth

has the worst of both worlds; it lacks the conciseness of the prose and the jollity of the rhymed verse.

The most interesting verses in the last poems of Lawrence belong to a literary genre he had not attempted before, satir­ical doggerel.

If formal verse can be likened to carving, free verse to modeling, then one might say that doggerel verse is like oh jets trouves—the piece of driftwood that looks like a witch, the stone that has a profile. The writer of doggerel, as it were, takes any old words, rhythms and rhymes that come into his head, gives them a good shake and then throws them onto the page like dice where, lo and behold, contrary to all probability they make sense, not by law but by chance. Since the words appear to have no will of their own, but to be the puppets of chance, so will the things or persons to which they refer; hence the value of doggerel for a certain kind of satire.

It is a different kind of satire from that written by Dryden and Pope. Their kind presupposes a universe, a city, governed by, or owing allegiance to, certain eternal laws of reason and morality; the purpose of their satire is to demonstrate that the individual or institution they are attacking violates these laws. Consequendy, the stricter in form their verse, the more artful their technique, the more effective it is. Satirical doggerel, on the other hand, presupposes no fixed laws. It is the weapon of the outsider, the anarchist rebel, who refuses to accept con­ventional laws and pieties as binding or worthy of respect. Hence its childish technique, for the child represents the naive and personal, as yet uncorrupted by education and convention. Satire of the Pope kind says: "The Emperor is wearing a celluloid collar. That simply isn't done." Satiric doggerel cries: "The Emperor is naked."

At this kind of satiric doggerel, Lawrence turned out to be a master.

And Mr. Meade, that old old lily,

Said: "Gross, coarse, hideous!" and I, like a silly

Thought he meant the faces of the police court officials

And how right he was, so I signed my initials.

But Tolstoi was a traitor To the Russia that needed him most, The great bewildered Russia So worried by the Holy Ghost; He shifted his job onto the peasants And landed them all on toast.

Parnassus has many mansions.

MARIANNE MOORE

Why an inordinate interest in animals and athletes? They are subjects for art and exem­plars of it, are they not? minding their own busi­ness. Pangolins, hornbills, pitchers, catchers, do not pry or prey—or prolong the conversation; do not make us self-conscious; look their best when caring least; although in a Frank Buck docu­mentary, I saw a leopard insult a crocodile (basking on the river bank—head only visible on the bank)—bat the animal on the nose and continue on its way without so much as a look back.