[In the following essay, Schaefer offers an explication of Lawrence's poem, “Mystic.”]

“Mystic” is a poetic exercise in demythologizing mystical experience, demystifying mysticism, one could say, while defending its elevated function in the life of the mind. Mystical experience was vital to D. H. Lawrence. Toward the end of “Excurse” in Women in Love, the cautious reader will note repeated use of some form of the word mystery in Lawrence's description of the physical relationship between Ursula and Birkin.

The tone of “Mystic” is sardonic-colloquial, beginning with an almost out of-the-side-of-the-mouth mutter: “They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience is considered.” Beginning as he does with the imprecisely referential third person plural, Lawrence establishes two facts: first, the poetic voice is that of a common man who refers to his fellows as “They,” meaning that although among them, he is in no way of them; second, the sense Lawrence gives of being a common man himself preconditions us to expect an act of demythologizing, a simplified apology for mystic experience. It is likely that there will be no conventional discourses on the stages of trance, nor on one's encompassing vision of totality in this statement about the mystic, a likelihood that is borne out. Yet, the sense we have of the poet's feelings of estrangement from others, that is, from “They,” establishes for us the fact that the others are people who are too busy having experience to consider or meditate it. Hence, Lawrence's demystification of mysticism is simply the addition of the ingredient of considering to the having of an experience.

For an example, Lawrence turns to something as unspectacular as eating an apple: “So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it / the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth / and the insistence of the sun” (24). The very simplicity of the example is of utmost importance, for the Laurentian principle at work; so elusive to many who converse about mystic experience is that it is not the properties of the thing or act experienced that render it mystic, but rather the act of considering it that gives it its loftiness and makes it mystic. An apple eaten without consideration in the nave of Winchester Cathedral is of no mystical worth, whereas an apple eaten with consideration beside a stile on a road in Yorkshire is a mystical moment. It is a matter of “mere” considering. As with apples, so with all other things, including prayers, as King Claudius discovered in Hamlet:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

(3.3)

In the first stanza, Lawrence ranges into descriptions of the various tastes he considers in apples—some “taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour and some of too much sun, brackish sweet / like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned” (6-8). His purpose is obviously not to excel in being a connoisseur of apples, but to demonstrate how vastly the experience of eating an apple is enhanced by the consideration of it. It is that simple and that profound.

Still to be confronted is the problem of the poet's estrangement from the rest of the world of humanity. Their response to his report of the considered taste of an apple is: “I am called mystic, which means a liar” while they “hog it down like a pig / and taste nothing / that is rear” (9-11). This wonderfully indignant juxtaposition of the meditative Lawrence, celebrant of the taste of apples, with the mass of humanity hogging down their apples without tasting and calling him a lying mystic—precisely because he reports his considered reaction to the apple—is a powerful allegory of the fundamentally irreconcilable gulf between the poetic and nonpoetic mentalities, the irreconcilable gulf, that is, between the living and dead imagination, or, as the angry Lawrence would have it, the difference simply between life and death.

The final two-line stanza neatly summarizes the contrast between two ways of eating an apple—between Lawrence the mystic and “They” who, in hogging down an apple, taste nothing that is real. The cleavage between the two antitheses is stark by implication, for it is the cleavage between “all my senses awake” and “the feeding of corpses.” The difference between the mystic eating of an apple and the piglike hogging of an apple is the difference between life and death.

The process of demythologizing mystic experience while exalting its function in the life of man is thus completed by the insistence that mysticism is simply the passing of all experience through the web-work of thought, greeting experience with all one's senses awake. By contrast, those who are too busy having experience to consider it are corpses.

Lawrence twice reminds us that his detractors in their experience of an apple “hog it down like a pig.” Surely this reiterated vocabulary, along with six uses of the word taste, serves to recall to our minds the tension that exists between tasting and consuming, and the paradox that taste considered requires the sacrifice of immediate and total consumption, whereas the voracious consumer who scoffs at the mystic experience obliterates even the possibility of the meditated life, and is reduced to the level of a barnyard animal.

The final realization of Lawrence's poem is that those who think about the life they are living are able to taste it, whereas those who merely live it without considering it, although they may comfort themselves with immediate and total consumption, taste nothing real.

Work Cited

Lawrence, D. H. “Mystic.” D. H. Lawrence: The Complete Poems. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts. New York: Penguin, 1982. Published by arrangement with the Estate of D. H. Lawrence and Viking Press.