The poetry of both Walsh and Carnevali has something of the vitality, something of the savage exacerbated tenderness, that marks the work of D. H. Lawrence. He attached himself early to the imagists rather because, like them, he craved immediacy, than because he understood their principles. He was too subjective to share their interest in technical subtleties, too apt to pour into his poems the crude emotion of the moment in all its turbidness. Yet his eye was the alert servant of his feeling, and he had an ear for personal rhythms. Scattered among his poems are a few small clear images, like that of the baby asleep after pain, hanging numb and heavy as “a drenched, drowned bee,” or the slight dawn poem called “Green,” which has the clarity of living green stems through which the sun is shining. There are pictures alive with color, among others, the woman bathing in the sunlight by the window, which glows like a golden Renoir come to life in music, and as against that, the sullen pigments in which he paints the Thames embankment at night, where houseless sleepers lie in huddled disarray, or the somber funeral procession under the Italian cypresses.

In Lawrence's most powerful work the metaphor takes on a symbolic value, as in his swan song: “The Ship of Death.” Of the several versions of this poem none is wholly satisfactory, but all are nobly conceived and deeply moving. It opens in the conventional metre of blank verse; as it progresses the rhythm becomes freer, though always retarded:

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.

The imagery is appropriately reminiscent of the most ancient hymns we know, those from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, notably that celebrating the voyage in the Boat of the Sun. The poem is also suggestive of lines by Whitman. It is saved from didacticism and sentimentality by the somber tone, the grave cadences, the simplicity of the language; and by the adventitious fact that is was composed by a dying man:

Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!
for you will need it.
For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

Lawrence's sense of verbal texture was erratic, at its strongest in a handful of love lyrics, and in the echoing rhymes of a few other poems. But he had an instinctive feeling for cadence, which also showed itself effectively in his later love poems. His rhythms were not consistently appropriate and altogether his work suffered from lack of discipline. Many pages offer mere jottings for the poems that he never took the trouble to compose. Some of his verse is no more than the groans and retchings and curses of a sick man, who, however uncertain his diagnosis, knows that he is dragging out his days in a sick society. Often Lawrence the prophet shouted down Lawrence the poet. But his attachment to the living world was too strong to be seriously obscured by his preachments and could be threatened but not destroyed by his formal ineptitude.

The obverse of the moralist's rage against the arrogant stupidity of the well-born, the fatuous stupidity of the rich, the violent stupidity of the mob, was the artist's will to preserve the integrity of the individual. Bound up with this was a sensual delight in the earth, in the sun and the serpent which it brings forth, in the darkness and the miracle of the senses that are alive in the dark. Like Rimbaud, welcoming “every influx of true vigor and tenderness,” Lawrence hoped for the restoration of what he called “the phallic consciousness” in our lives: “the source of all real beauty, and all real gentleness,” and which, he insisted, “is not the cerebral sex-consciousness, but something really deeper, and the root of poetry, lived or sung.” This conviction is uttered in “The Wild Common,” which opens his Collected Poems:

The quick jets on the gorse-bushes are leaping
Little jets of sunlight texture imitating flame …

“But how splendid it is to be substance, here!” he exclaims, and then: “My shadow is neither here nor there; but I, I am royally here!” The sweeping peewits, the rabbits, the glittering gorse, the water with his shadow, which is more truly the white reflection of his body, quivering upon it, the seven larks singing at once, are all part of his paean. How many of his later poems are iterations of that first statement in “The Wild Common”: “all that is God takes substance!” In the same way they continue to assert the lesson of an early piece, a young teacher's word to his pupils, called “Discipline”:

the fight is not for existence, the fight is to burn
At last into blossom of being, each one his own flower outflung.

Nowhere is this more clearly stated than in one of his last poems, “Flowers and Men,” an arraignment of those who kept misunderstanding his demand for the achievement of selfhood. Though marred by its petulant tone, the poem evokes with sparse means the unspoiled life of the flowers he loved. It should be read together with “Bavarian Gentians,” wherein he invokes the blue torch of the flower as a symbol of the fructifying dark. His acceptance of death was akin to that which Whitman expressed, and, as has been noted, Lawrence used almost the same imagery, without impatience but with a kind of sad serenity taking ship for the longest journey. This, too, meant affirmation. Whatever his irritations with the less amiable forms of life, the only creatures that his heart could not own were the fish, colder than any reptile, as loveless in companies as in isolation. But he wrote a delighted poem about dolphins leaping as if around Dionysus' vine-wreathed ship. He could praise the loveless element for the sake of “the bouncing of these small and happy whales.” This small and happy tribute to warm-blooded life occurs in the midst of his farewells to the world.

For all its flaws, the body of his poetry makes him free of the company of such a great modern as Hardy, such a great forebear as William Blake. He wrote lyrics as dramatic, as forthright, and as ironical as any comparable poems by the Wessex master. And, after endlessly renewed battles with abstractions, he echoed Blake in declaring the profoundest sensual experience to be the sense of truth and the sense of justice. His final poems are a protest, spoken in defense of true vigor and tenderness, and reminding us of the wise madman who cleansed “the doors of perception” and looked out upon a universe throbbing with energy.

Lawrence's elaborate fantasies about birds, beasts, and flowers offer some of the strongest tokens of his delight in the fierce strangeness and variety of the world. Too often, here, as elsewhere, he intrudes himself upon the poem, so that his Tuscan cypresses and grapes, like his ponderous elephants and beak-mouthed tortoises with the Cross upon their shells, are compelled to become an illustration of some aspect of his confused passionate thought. Thus the poem, “Snake,” remarkable in certain particulars, hovers between a clean objectivity and a moody subjectivity. Superficially, it is a mere anecdote, beginning simply enough:

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

The speaker is annoyed because he must wait with his pitcher. The reader must wait, too, wait patiently and delightedly, to watch the snake drink:

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.

But precisely because the snake is this beautiful gold color, the watcher hears a voice reminding him that it is venomous and must be killed. He cannot, however, bring himself to kill the creature, is it out of cowardice, perversity, humility, or secret gladness that this guest had come to drink at his water-trough,

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless
Into the burning bowels of the earth?

Only when the slow, dreamy, godlike thing eases itself deliberately down into the black hole from which it had emerged, the watcher, out of an impulse that he but half comprehends, throws a clumsy log at the water-trough, and the snake, though perhaps not hit, “Writhed like lightning, and was gone.” Immediately the watcher is overcome with regret and compares the snake to the albatross, and wishes him back again, thinking of him

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

The watcher has missed his chance “with one of the lords of life” and has a pettiness to expiate. The poem is bathed in an atmosphere of sultry suspense. Words and phrases are continually repeated, sometimes with slight variations, like the golden-brown coils of the drinking snake. The stanza that describes the snake drinking is especially good, with the contrast between the hissing sibilants and the “ow,” “oo,” “o” sounds that have the effect of dark pigments in a painting.

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.

Lawrence is too much on the scene in this poem, yet the uncrowned king of the underworld is paramount, even as he vanishes. The fact that the snake is a phallic symbol enlarges the poem's significance, and makes of it almost a parable.

When Lawrence died, Williams wrote an elegy for him that bore witness to their kinship. It is further attested to in the best work of Kenneth Rexroth, who has come under the influence of both these elders. For a time he and Williams were associated with the little circle of self-styled objectivists headed by Louis Zukovsky, epigones of the imagists. Rexroth has experimented with various techniques, including that of the “cubist” poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. Here separate images, separate lines, seemingly unrelated, yet build up to form, for the sympathetic reader, an emotional whole. Rexroth, while not repudiating his early efforts, adopts in his mature work a style that answers the imagists' call for palpable definiteness of statement and deep truth of feeling.

Some of his most moving poems are those written in commemoration of his first wife. They are very personal and yet have a wide validity because they deal simply and affectingly with the fact of loss. A sufficiently large part of his poetry meets Ernest Walsh's demand for work “which does not offend or sound false when competing with Death.” His slowly moving, considered, heavily weighted verse is more disciplined than that of Lawrence, more nostalgic than that of Williams, and has a larger literary allusiveness than either found acceptable. It draws upon the subliminal sources that have nourished both.