Several of the poems that D. H. Lawrence wrote in the last months of his life are considered to be among his finest, and among the finest English poems of the century; but it has not been observed that the posthumously published notebook that includes “Bavarian Gentians” and “The Ship of Death” is a unified and cohesively organized work that extends Lawrence's most fundamental religious perceptions into one of his major literary accomplishments. In his introduction to Lawrence's Last Poems, first published by Giuseppe Orioli in 1932, Richard Aldington lamented the fact that the poet had not lived to complete his work: “He was too weary, he could not find the strength to build his ship of death and at the same time to build the full whole song of it.”¹ But whether or not the sequence of sixty-seven poems that begins with “The Greeks Are Coming!” and ends with “Phoenix” represents Lawrence's final intention, it stands as a coherent and important work. As Tom Marshall has implied and Elizabeth Cipolla and Michael Kirkham have stated, Last Poems can and should be read as if it were a single long poem.² It is a poem that expresses Lawrence's fervent and very personal religious understanding of life as a preparation for death and ultimate rebirth. Last Poems asserts the primary importance of each individual's relationship with the world of experience, so that in the context of Lawrence's whole career it strongly qualifies the collectivistic emphasis of Apocalypse, Lawrence's other late religious statement.³

It could be maintained that in a loose sense all of Lawrence's mature poetry is religious, but Last Poems differs from Look! We Have Come Through!, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, and the bulk of Pansies in that it expresses Lawrence's beliefs in explicitly religious terms, in a sacramental and mythological framework. The sequence deals with the areas of experience that have always been the province of religion: the conduct of life, the nature of evil, the identity of God or the gods, the problem of death and life after death. In Last Poems Lawrence gave poetic life to the “Future Religion” that he had outlined in one of his Pansies.

The future of religion is in the mystery of touch.
The mind is touchless, so is the will, so is the spirit.
First comes the death, then the pure aloneness, which
                                                                                is permanent
then the resurrection into touch.

(II, 611)

It is this basic pattern that informs the volume of Last Poems, giving it structural and thematic coherence. The opening sequence of some twenty poems deals with the “mystery of touch,” exploring the varied possibilities of the world of the senses. The poems from “The Hands of God” to “Departure” evoke the emptiness and horror of a life without touch, a life dominated by the mind and the will. Finally, the sequence that begins with “The Ship of Death” offers Lawrence's vision of the journey of death, oblivion, and bodily resurrection—a vision that was intensely personal yet was drawn from the distant reaches of human memory.

The personal quality of Last Poems is made clear at once by its setting: the Mediterranean as it existed for Lawrence's consciousness as he sat beside its waters at Bandol in the autumn of 1929.⁴ The modern Mediterranean was there, with its sunbathers and ocean liners, but for Lawrence the ancient sea of the Argonauts and the Etruscans was also present, just as physically and just as convincingly. The thematic structure of Last Poems is analogous to that of symphonic music. Themes, images, and verbal motifs are stated and developed through a series of poems; new themes are introduced and developed in turn, and earlier ones are recapitulated and juxtaposed. The volume begins with a vision of the return of the ancient Greek gods and heroes to the modern Mediterranean. Subsequent poems turn to Judeo-Christian imagery, but “Maximus,” “The Man of Tyre,” “They Say the Sea is Loveless,” and “Bavarian Gentians” return to classical themes; all of these poems express and affirm the importance of the senses—“the mystery of touch.” The fall of Lucifer sets the tone for the second sequence of poems, which is antithetical to the first. Here Lawrence juxtaposes Judeo-Christian formulations with observations about the modern “touchless” world and more poems that draw on the Greek heritage—this time the pre-Socratic philosophers. The concluding “Ship of Death” sequence is founded on Lawrence's understanding of the customs of ancient Egypt and Etruria, expressing through them Lawrence's vision of death, oblivion, and the “resurrection into touch.”

The civilizations of the ancient world assert their presence in Last Poems not only in the subject matter but also in the form of the poetry, which reflects their modes of consciousness as Lawrence understood them. Mark Spilka has recognized the connection between the primitive concept of theos or mana and Lawrence's manner of writing, in prose as well as verse.⁵ For Lawrence as for the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean, spiritual value is immanent in the things of the world, and meaning is not fixed or static but rather shifts constantly among the things that pass through an individual consciousness; this is why the immediacy of touch—intuitive understanding—is so important to Lawrence. As Spilka points out, the fluidity and apparent “carelessness” of Lawrence's writing is really a function of his adherence to a different concept of meaning and value than that which governs most modern literature. For Lawrence poetry is not a means of discovering a pre-existent or ideal Truth, but a way of recording the passing physical truths that present themselves to an alert consciousness.

Lawrence enunciated the attitudes that underlie the overall structure of Last Poems in his description in Apocalypse of the old, sensual “cult-lore” that preceded the more intellectual “culture” of the Hellenic Greeks.

We have not the faintest conception of the vast range that was covered by the ancient sense-consciousness. We have lost almost entirely the great and intricately developed sense-awareness, and sense-knowledge, of the ancients. It was a great depth of knowledge based not on words but on images. The abstraction was not into generalisations or into qualities, but into symbols. And the connection was not logical but emotional. The word “therefore” did not exist. Images or symbols succeeded one another in a procession of instinctive and arbitrary physical connection—some of the psalms give us examples—and they “get nowhere” because there was nowhere to get to, the desire was to achieve a consummation of a certain state of consciousness, to fulfill a certain state of feeling-awareness.⁶

Similarly, the goal of Last Poems is a state of awareness rather than a state of conviction, for the “Future Religion” that Lawrence imagined was basically a process, a way of living, rather than a set of beliefs. The volume moves toward the evocation of that state not through logical connections but through a succession of images, symbols, and contrasting rhythms.

As the critical response to “Bavarian Gentians” and “The Ship of Death” has demonstrated, the individual poems in the volume can be appreciated independently. But as in some of Lawrence's earlier volumes, particularly Look! We Have Come Through! and Tortoises, the limits of each poem are defined only vaguely. For example, the first four pieces in Last Poems are separate and distinct in subject and expression, yet together they form a unit and, in turn, part of a larger cycle of some twenty poems. These patterns of interconnection are not solely thematic; Last Poems is given coherence and also variety through a broad formal structure that results from the placement of poems of varied length, diction, and rhythm. More carefully than in any of his earlier poetic works, Lawrence here took advantage of the flexibility of his free-verse medium to create a controlled pattern of emotional peaks, valleys, and plains that underscores the volume's thematic structure. The prosaic flatness of poems like “In the Cities” and “The Evil World-Soul” emphasizes the odiousness of the touchless, will-dominated existence they describe,⁷ and contrasts with the lyric intensity of “For the Heroes Are Dipped in Scarlet,” “Whales Weep Not,” and “The Ship of Death.” Last Poems has a complexity and at the same time a unity of expression that exceeds anything that Lawrence had accomplished in earlier volumes of poetry.

As I have indicated, the thematic and formal patterns of Last Poems follow the outlines of Lawrence's earlier poem, “Future Religion,” presenting a way of life, a warning, and finally a new sacrament of death, oblivion, and rebirth. The first cycle or sequence of poems, the poems that explore the “mystery of touch,” establishes the physical and emotional setting for the volume as a whole. The first, “The Greeks Are Coming!,” is a poem of rebirth and return: the return of the gods and heroes of the Homeric age; yet it is also a poem of the present, in which graceless ocean liners cross the Mediterranean distances once traversed by the Argonauts.

And every time it is ships, it is ships,
It is ships of Cnossos coming, out of the morning end of the sea,
It is Aegean ships, and men with archaic, pointed beards
coming out of the eastern end.
But it is far-off foam.
And an ocean liner, going east, like a small beetle walking the edge
is leaving a long thread of dark smoke
like a bad smell.

(II, 687)

This is poetry of the “immediate, instant moment,”⁸ reflecting Lawrence's unstudied response to his changing perceptions of the scene before him. But the apparently spontaneous flow of words is given poetic coherence through the repetition of words and phrases whose significance is amplified as the poem—and the poetic sequence—progresses. In “The Argonauts,” the second poem, the waning of day gives the ancient ships new reality, and the poet's excitement mounts in the third poem as the heroes actually assert their physical presence. In “For the Heroes are Dipped in Scarlet” he plainly states the theme that had been developed symbolically in the first three poems.

Before Plato told the great lie of ideals
men slimly went like fishes, and didn't care.

(II, 688)

Before Plato told men that they were nothing and that reality was somewhere outside and beyond them, they simply lived and laughed and fought and danced and were beautiful, like these bearded warriors whose being is so vital and whose mana is so strong that they are still present in the flesh. They are painted red in affirmation of the power of the blood pulsing in their bodies. The poem rises from the quiet assertions of the opening stanzas to a series of excited exclamations that brings the opening sequence of four poems to an end.

So now they come back! Hark!
Hark! the low and shattering laughter of bearded men
with slim waists of warriors, and the long feet
of moon-lit dancers.
Oh, and their faces scarlet, like the dolphin's blood!
Lo! the loveliest is red all over, rippling vermillion
as he ripples upwards!
Laughing in his black beard!
They are dancing! they return, as they went, dancing!
For the thing that is done without the glowing as of God, vermillion,
were best not done at all.
How glistening red they are!

(II, 689)

“Demiurge,” the poem that follows, provides a direct contrast to the initial sequence, and thus establishes the volume's overall rhythm. The agitated exclamations and vivid symbols are gone. “Demiurge” and the poems it introduces are further refutations of the “lie of ideals,” but their movement is logical rather than imagistic, and their language is more abstract.

They say that reality exists only in the spirit
that corporal existence is a kind of death
that pure being is bodiless
that the idea of the form precedes the form substantial.
But what nonsense it is!
as if any mind could have imagined a lobster
dozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw.
Even the mind of God can only imagine
those things that have become themselves:
Bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foot-hold in creation
even if it is only a lobster on tip-toe.

(II, 689)

The succeeding poems also develop the thought and its implications in generally Christian frames of reference, but in varying tones: humorously as in “Red Geranium and Godly Mignonette,” or assertively as in “The Body of God.” Together, they provide a release from the intensity of the opening sequence, and they contrast with the even greater intensity of the next group of poems, which includes “The Man of Tyre,” “Whales Weep Not,” and “Bavarian Gentians.”

These later poems return the focus of the volume to the sea and to the civilization of the ancient Greeks; they also create a second peak of lyric expression, linking them with the opening sequence and, later, with “The Ship of Death.” But within the larger emotional rhythm of Last Poems there are subtler movements, and these poems cannot be considered a unit in the same sense as the group of four that opens the volume. “The Body of God” prepares for them thematically by stating that God has many manifestations: “men singing songs, and women brushing their hair in the sun”; and the poem “Maximus,” in the calm, ordinary diction of “Demiurge,” gives an account of one such manifestation: the god Hermes, warming himself at the poet's hearth.

“The Man of Tyre” also deals with the nature of God, in a scene that parallels Stephen Dedalus' vision in section IV of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist. There is no need to emulate Michael Kirkham's exegesis of the poem in a recent essay,⁹ but it should be recognized that the poem is central to Lawrence's exposition of the spiritual significance of physical presences. The man of Tyre walks along the shore pondering the unity of God when he suddenly sees a woman bathing naked in the sea.

Oh lovely, lovely with the dark hair piled up, as she went
                    deeper, deeper down the channel, then rose
                    shallower, shallower
With the full thighs slowly lifting of the wader wading
                    shorewards
and the shoulders pallid with light from the silent sky behind
both breasts dim and mysterious, with the glamorous kindness
                    of twilight between them
and the dim notch of black maidenhair like an indicator,
giving a message to the man—
So in the cane-break he clasped his hands in delight
that could only be god-given, and murmured:
Lo! God is one god! But here in the twilight
godly and lovely comes Aphrodite out of the sea
towards me!

(II, 693)

The specificity and physicality of this description, as well as its carefully controlled formal structure, contrast sharply with the loose, conversational movement of the poems that precede it. The poet follows every movement as the woman goes “deeper, deeper” into the channel and then “shallower, shallower” to reveal her full godlike beauty to the watcher. The poem exemplifies the delicate balance in Lawrence's diction which lends a quality of spiritual immanence to what is also sensuously physical. The description focuses on the woman's sexuality: her “full thighs” and the “glamorous kindness of twilight” between her breasts; but the vague adjectives—“pallid,” “dim,” “mysterious”—give her an ethereal quality and invest her with another kind of mystery.

This balance and interpenetration between the spiritual and the physical in Lawrence's sacramental vision of earthly experience receives further expression in “Whales Weep Not,” where the mating of the great mammals is described as the movement of “archangels of bliss.”

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.

(II, 694)

The sensuality of “The Man of Tyre” and the rhythmic drive of “For the Heroes Are Dipped in Scarlet” are both exceeded in this poem as strongly stressed syllables are crowded one upon another in an evocation of the silent thunder of the mating whales.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking
                                        the wonder of whales
and burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth,
keep passing archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves
                                        out of the sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

(II, 694)

This is the climax of the volume's first section, an ultimate manifestation of the wonder and mystery of the world of touch. The poem calls the whole of Lawrence's earlier volume Birds, Beasts and Flowers retrospectively into this new context. The hot-blooded, mountainous whales are living manifestations of God; they have a unique and wonderful mana—and so by implication do, in their smaller ways, the fishes and tortoises and mountain lions and almond trees of the earlier volume. This is one of the sudden changes in levels of awareness that Lawrence associated with the ancient “cult-lore” he described in Apocalypse: “To appreciate the pagan manner of thought we have to drop our own manner of on-and-on-and-on, from a start to a finish, and allow the mind to move in cycles, or to flit here and there over a cluster of images. … One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once.”¹⁰ Here, Lawrence shifts from the world of the Mediterranean gods and heroes to the “great heaven of whales in the waters,” and through them back to the world of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, where every living thing is suddenly revealed as a god, a theos, in itself.

“Whales Weep Not” is followed by two more poems that present theoi in the manner of Birds, Beasts and Flowers; but “Butterfly” also reasserts the physical setting of the volume at a villa by the Mediterranean, and “Bavarian Gentians” introduces the theme that will dominate the final section of Last Poems. This is the first of the poems that deals directly with death and the preparation for it. The death imagined here follows the pattern of Persephone's descent into the underworld, a place which has a dark beauty that mirrors the daylight beauty of the world under the sky.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower,
down the dark and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on
                                                                                blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
of a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
                                                                                the lost bride and her groom.

(II, 697)

As the poet imagines himself descending deeper, the repetitions of the words “blue” and “blueness,” “dark” and “darkness” multiply until there is little else, perhaps prefiguring the “oblivion” of the volume's final sequence. But at the same time “Bavarian Gentians” also brings the poems about the varieties of sensual experience to an appropriate close. The underworld is dim and gloomy, but it is still a world of the senses whose darkness has a certain splendor. Seasonal myths like that of Persephone imply an eventual rebirth, a resurrection in the flesh. This aspect of the pattern of Lawrence's “Future Religion” does not figure directly in “Bavarian Gentians,” but the unspoken implication helps to prepare for the affirmations of the “Ship of Death” sequence.

More immediately, however, the myth of Persephone suggests another descent: the fall of Lucifer, with whose story the second major cycle of poems begins. In more than thirty poems Lawrence explores the “touchless” life of mind and will, the negative inversion of the life of the senses. Lucifer's sin—and the sin of any man who “falls from the hands of God”—is willful self-knowledge; and hell is “the turning-down plunge of writhing of self-knowledge, self-analysis / which goes further and further, yet never finds an end” (II, 701). As these lines suggest, these poems are abstract rather than imagistic, expository rather than symbolic; and that fact is itself symbolic in the larger scheme of Last Poems, A dry, intellectual mode of expression becomes dominant over a long series of poems: from the plight of Lucifer, Lawrence turns to the errors of the early Greek philosophers who denied the primacy of the senses, and then to the manifestations of “touchless” evil in the modern world. These poems are abstract and argumentative; Richard Aldington has called these meditations on evil “a series of scoldings, which are little better than Pansies,” the casual satirical verses that Lawrence had published in 1928.¹¹ Aldington failed to recognize, however, that these admittedly angry and often prosaic verses form an integral part of the thematic and formal movement of Last Poems. They are anticipated in the ugly modern steamship of “The Greeks Are Coming!” and they lead directly to the climactic poem, “The Ship of Death.” In terms of the volume's poetic texture, their verbal and rhythmic flatness sets off the lyricism of the poems that precede them and of the “Ship of Death” cycle that follows.

Evil, as Lawrence understands it, is the inevitable outcome of the dominance of mind. Man becomes evil when, insisting on the superiority of the mind over the body, he releases his ego from the constraints and checks offered by the rest of the physical world. He becomes a human machine recklessly proceeding toward his own willed ends, and becomes finally the servant of machines.

When the mind makes a wheel which turns on the hub of the ego
and the will, the living dynamo, gives the motion and the speed
and the wheel of the conscious self spins on in absolution,
                                                                                absolute
absolute, absolved from the sun and the earth and the moon,
absolute consciousness, absolved from strife and kisses
absolute self-awareness, absolved from the meddling of creation
absolute freedom, absolved from the great necessities of being
then we see evil, pure evil
and we see it only in man
and in his machines.

(II, 712)

The last several of these poems are progressively fragmented; there is no pretense of sustained thought, but merely a rush to express each angry observation. In “Departure” the poet catalogues the modern manifestations of evil, always returning to the word itself to build up a verbal tension that finds sudden release in “The Ship of Death.”

All forms of abstraction are evil:
finance is a great evil abstraction
science has now become an evil abstraction
education is an evil abstraction.
Jazz and film and wireless
are all evil abstractions from life.
Evil is upon us and has got hold of us.
Men must depart from it, or all is lost.
We must make an isle impregnable
against evil.

(II, 716)

“Departure” ends with a challenge: evil, mechanical abstraction has conquered the modern world, and the only hope is that individuals may turn away from evil and somehow “make an isle impregnable” against it.

Lawrence's response to this challenge comes in “The Ship of Death” and the shorter poems that accompany it. In them he develops the pattern of death and rebirth that he had stated in “Future Religion”: first comes death, then the aloneness of oblivion, and finally the resurrection into touch. “The Ship of Death” brings another of the changes in mode and shifts in levels of awareness that characterize Last Poems. The invective against abstraction and absolutism is suddenly shut off, as if the poet had closed a door on a room full of noise. The poem does not plunge into the world of the senses like “For the Heroes Are Dipped in Scarlet” and “Whales Weep Not”; it begins quietly and cautiously, proceeding through neatly divided sections with surprising rhythmic regularity. This is still free verse, but it has an iambic core that helps to create a mood of calm determination. Unlike the poems of the volume's second major cycle, “The Ship of Death” is not abstract. It has the same physical immediacy, the same sense of a consciousness reacting directly to experience, that can be found in Birds, Beasts and Flowers and in poems like “The Man of Tyre”; but this world of experience is a very different one, and this consciousness proceeds in it with more deliberation.

I

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.
The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.
And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one's own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.

II

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?
O build your ship of death, for you will need it.
The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall
thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.
And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!
Ah! can't you smell it?

(II, 716-17)

Although Lawrence knew when he wrote this that he was fatally ill, the poem's autumnal imagery gives it a more than merely personal significance. The ancient seasonal myths are suggested indirectly (that of Persephone having figured in “Bavarian Gentians”), and with them a hint of the bodily rebirth that will follow death. But this is not a “mythological” poem that solves the problem of the preparation for death for a whole civilization on a symbolic level. It is an invitation to introspection and self-questioning: how can we, in the face of the fact of death, attain “the deep and lovely quiet / of a strong heart at peace”?

Lawrence's answer is put in terms of a ritual suggested by the funerary practices of the ancient Etruscans. Death is seen as a lonely journey for which each man must build a suitable vessel to sustain him.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes …

(II, 719)

The ship of the soul is patterned after the little bronze arks that Lawrence saw in the Etruscan tombs at Cerveteri. He explained in Etruscan Places why the Etruscans provided for the physical well-being of their dead: death was more a place than a state of being (or not-being); its boundary with life was not marked by distinctions of flesh and spirit.

And death, to the Etruscan, was a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. It was neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven, nor a purgatory of torment. It was just a natural continuance of the fullness of life. Everything was in terms of life, of living.¹²

In Lawrence's poem “the body dies,” but the state of the soul after death is never explained, because explanation would be more falsification and dishonesty. Instead, the journey of death is imagined as a real journey, with all the fear and doubt and wonder that would attend a lone mariner on the open sea.

There is no port, there is nowhere to go
only the deepening blackness darkening still
blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood
darkness at one with darkness, up and down
and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction any more.
and the little ship is there; yet she is gone.
She is not seen, for there is nothing to see her by.
She is gone! gone! and yet
somewhere she is there.
Nowhere!

VIII

And everything is gone, the body is gone
completely under, gone, entirely gone.
The upper darkness is heavy as the lower,
between them the little ship
is gone
she is gone.
It is the end, it is oblivion.

(II, 719)

What “oblivion” means is not yet clear, nor does it become clear in this one poem. “The Ship of Death” is not an appeal to the rational consciousness; it is an account of a religious experience—“an experience deep down in the senses, inexplicable and inscrutable.”¹³ It is the sensual detail of Lawrence's description of a dawn at sea, in the poem's final stanzas, that creates an atmosphere of intuitive acceptance for his assertion that the journey of death ends in the resurrection of the body.

Wait, wait, the little ship
drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey
of a flood-dawn.
Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow
and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.
A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

(II, 720)

Richard Aldington has expressed regret that the final sequence of Last Poems was not integrated into a longer version of “The Ship of Death”: “As the first draft shows, Lawrence probably meant to make this one long poem, and if this could have been done it would have been his greatest achievement as a poet.”¹⁴ As Elizabeth Cipolla has observed,¹⁵ Aldington failed to consider that throughout his poetic career, and certainly in Last Poems, Lawrence wrote in extended poetic sequences rather than in sharply delimited individual poems. Each titled poem is an extension of or a commentary upon the others around it, creating a larger unit that reflects the changes of thought and feeling that a man undergoes over a period of time. Furthermore, in the context of Last Poems, even an extended version of “The Ship of Death” would have been too short, and perhaps too tentative, to balance and resolve the long cycle of negative poems that precedes it. The first draft of “The Ship of Death” which Aldington found in another manuscript probably represents a limited, early attempt at expression, while the long sequence from “The Ship of Death” to “Phoenix” is a more finished and, at least in Lawrence's estimation, a superior work.¹⁶ The shorter poems that follow it explain some of the implications of the journey of “The Ship of Death,” and they extend and clarify its symbolic significance. In his own characteristic way Lawrence did write the single long poem that Aldington looked for.

These poems underscore the importance of a conscious preparation for death; living men must learn to see death in proper perspective, as the necessary complement to the fulness of life.

Sing then the song of death, and the longest journey
and what the soul takes with him, and what he leaves behind,
and how he enters fold after fold of deepening darkness
for the cosmos even in death is like a dark whorled shell
whose whorls fold round to the core of soundless silence and
                                                            pivotal oblivion
where the soul comes at last, and has utter peace.
Sing then the core of dark and absolute
oblivion where the soul at last is lost
in utter peace.
Sing the song of death, O sing it!

(II, 724)

The “oblivion” that Lawrence describes is more than mere insensateness; it is the “pure aloneness” of the poem “Future Religion,” the death of the ego that must precede the resurrection of the body. Oblivion is not the renunciation of experience but the fulfillment of a life lived in sensual awareness. Only abstract, mechanical knowledge, the kind of touchless self-knowledge that Lawrence rejects in the poems that precede “The Ship of Death,” is cast out. Rather than nothingness, oblivion means the renunciation of the personal, self-knowing ego in an opening of the personality to spontaneity and change.

In Lawrence's “Future Religion” the rebirth from oblivion may come after actual, physical death; but “Shadows,” one of the last poems in the volume, affirms that the building of the ship of death is also a preparation for life. The “resurrection into touch” can come in the midst of a man's life if he is willing to cease from static knowledge and enter into the universal pattern of vital change.

And if, as autumn deepens and darkens
I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms,
and trouble and dissolution and distress
and then the softness of deep shadows folding, folding
around my soul and spirit, around my lips
so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song
singing darker than the nightingale, on, on to the solstice
and the silence of short days, the silence of the year, the shadow,
then I shall know that my life is moving still
with the dark earth, and drenched
with the deep oblivion of the earth's lapse and renewal.

(II, 727)

Thus oblivion means a willingness to be blotted out as a fixed personality again and again in the continuing movement of the universe, and to be made anew by the contingencies of the living world. “Phoenix,” the final poem in the sequence of Last Poems, is a challenge to face this kind of oblivion and rebirth.

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?
If not, you will never really change.
The phoenix renews her youth
only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down
to hot and flocculent ash.
Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest
with strands of down like floating ash
Shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle,
immortal bird.

(II, 728)

Like almost all of Lawrence's works, his Last Poems ends with a beginning. Admittedly, the sequence of poems from “The Greeks Are Coming!” to “Phoenix” is in more than one sense a culmination. It is a mature statement of religious belief, for it presents a summation in symbolic form of Lawrence's approach to life. It exhibits a subtle, confident handling of the free-verse techniques that Lawrence had developed in earlier volumes of poetry. In spite of the fact that it is only a manuscript, never prepared for publication by its author, it is a complex and unified work that embodies Lawrence's spontaneous approach to the world of experience. Yet Last Poems is not a completion; there is no ultimate answer for Lawrence, but only a series of explorations, celebrations, warnings, and challenges. The highest and most deserved praise of Lawrence's Last Poems is that it is in no sense fixed or complete; like the “Future Religion” that Lawrence imagined, it is spontaneous, open-ended, and vital.

Notes

1. The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts (London: Heinemann, 1967), II, 598. Volume and page references in the text are to this edition.

2. Tom Marshall, The Psychic Mariner: A Reading of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1970), pp. 195-225; Elizabeth Cipolla, “The Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence,” D. H. Lawrence Review, 2 (Summer, 1969), 111; Michael Kirkham, “D. H. Lawrence's Last Poems,” D. H. Lawrence Review, 5 (Summer, 1972), 97-120. Cipolla observes that “the poems show Lawrence's thoughts gradually turning from life to death.” As I hope to demonstrate, the structure of Last Poems is in fact more complex.

3. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (Florence: G. Orioli, 1931). For a discussion of the development towards communalism in Lawrence's writings, see Baruch Hochman, Another Ego (Columbia, S.C.: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1970).

4. See Lawrence's letter to Else Jaffe, 4 October 1929, The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore (London: Heinemann, 1962), II, 1206.

5. Mark Spilka, “Was D. H. Lawrence a Symbolist?” Accent, 15, No. 1 (Winter, 1955), 50-51.

6. Apocalypse, pp. 133-34.

7. Kirkham (p. 101) observes that in these poems “Lawrence is working within traditional forms of thought and feeling the doctrinal core of which he had disowned.” See Lawrence's 1918 essay, “Poetry of the Present” in Complete Poems, I, 181 ff.

8. “Poetry of the Present,” Complete Poems, I, 181.

9. Kirkham, pp. 110-16.

10. Apocalypse, pp. 133-34.

11. Complete Poems, II, 597.

12. D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places (London: Martin Secker, 1932), p. 28.

13. D. H. Lawrence, “New Mexico” (1931), in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 144.

14. Complete Poems, II, 598.

15. Cipolla, p. 111.

16. For descriptions of these manuscripts, see Aldington's introduction to Last Poems, in Complete Poems, II, 597.