Lawrence, D. H. - Ross C. Murfin (essay date 1980)

Ross C. Murfin (essay date 1980)

SOURCE: "Hymn to Priapus: Lawrence's Poetry of Difference," in Criticism, Vol. XXII, No. 3, Summer, 1980, pp. 214-29.

[In the following essay, Murfin finds similarities and differences between Lawrence's "Hymn to Priapus" and works by Charles Algernon Swinburne and Thomas Hardy.]

The speaker of the "Hymn to Priapus," like the speakers in all the other lyrics in D. H. Lawrence's volume of poems entitled Look! We Have Come Through!, may be taken to be Lawrence himself. He tells us he "danced at a Christmas party/Under the mistletoe"

Along with a ripe, slack country lass
Jostling to and fro.

At the dance or, more likely, after the dance, the country lass "slipped through" the speaker's "arms on the threshing floor," where he found her "Sweet as an armful of wheat." As if words like "armful" and images of "threshing" a "ripe . . . country" woman on the "floor"...

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