SOURCE: "'Secret Sin': Lawrence's Early Verse," in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer, 1975, pp. 155-75.

Throughout his career as a writer, Lawrence's attitude toward literature was remarkably ambivalent. "Artspeech is the only truth," he declared (SCAL 2).¹ Yet his mistrust of art was profound. He knew how easily it could degenerate into pretty artifice or aesthetic exercise and so seduce the artist into a lie. But when literature spoke truth, it was perhaps most dangerous and the artist finally most guilty. An examination of Lawrence's early verse, together with his later comments on it, helps explain his misgivings.

In 1928, Lawrence wrote an essay (originally intended as a foreword to his Collected Poems in which he recalled his early efforts at writing verse.

.. . I remember . . . half-furtive moments when I would absorbedly scribble at verse for an hour or so, and then run away from the act and the production as if it were secret sin. It seems to me that "knowing oneself was a sin and a vice for innumerable centuries, before it became a virtue. It seems to me, that it is still a sin and vice, when it comes to new knowledge.—In those early days—for I was very green and unsophisticated at twenty—I used to feel myself at times haunted by something, and a little guilty about it, as if it were an abnormality. Then the haunting would get the better of me, and the ghost would suddenly appear, in the shape of a usually rather incoherent poem. Nearly always I shunned the apparition once it had appeared. From the first, I was a little afraid of my real poems—not my "compositions," but the poems that had the ghost in them. They seemed to me to come from somewhere, I didn't quite know where, out of a me whom I didn't know and didn't want to know, and to say things I would much rather not have said: for choice.

A few sentences later, Lawrence confessed,

To this day, I still have the uneasy haunted feeling, and would rather not write most of the things I do write—including this note. Only now I know my demon better, and, after bitter years, respect him more than my other, milder and nicer self.

(CP 849-50)

To Lawrence, then, writing poetry seemed like engaging in a furtive quest for self-knowledge, a process at once "guilty" and "abnormal." Such language suggests a secret act more sexual than literary. Specifically, it suggests that most common and highly-charged adolescent secret, masturbation. The association is not so far-fetched: the conscious exploration of one's feelings might be interpreted as a kind of narcissistic self-manipulation. At any rate—and this is the important fact—Lawrence saw the analogy. In "Introduction to These Paintings," an essay also written in 1928, he bitterly referred to his age as "the great day of the masturbating consciousness when the mind prostitutes the sensitive responsive body, and just forces the reactions" (P 575). Six years earlier, in Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence had already discerned an identity between the urge toward self-examination and masturbation.

And so you get first and foremost, self-consciousness, an intense consciousness in the upper self of the lower self. This is the first disaster. Then you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in masturbation.

(FU 155)

Lawrence specifies that in writing verse, not only the "act," but the "production" as well seemed evil. The production was evil apparently because of what he discovered, "a me I didn't know and didn't want to know," a self who was not "mild," not "loveable," not "nice," who was then, by implication, aggressive, hateful (and perhaps terrifying), and certainly sexual. Many years later, in decrying the "unaccountable and disastrous fear of sex" that torments the modern Englishman, Lawrence brought his own early experience to bear in his essay "The State of Funk":

I know when I was a lad of eighteen [Lawrence wrote his first poems, he said, at nineteen], I used to remember with shame and rage in the morning the sexual thoughts and desires I had had the night before. Shame, and rage, and terror lest anybody else should have to know. And I hated the self that I had been, the night before.

(P II 568)

The "sexual thoughts and desires" accompanying masturbation must have provoked in Lawrence more anxiety than the act itself. His habitual denunciation of "sex-inthe-head" probably reflects, in great part, the revulsion he felt at these masturbatory fantasies, just as his romantic portrayal of himself as poet possessed suggests a need to deny responsibility for his own wishes. The demon forces him to write things he would "rather not write." Certainly the allegorical projection of two selves, demon and mild young man, is a way of distancing both from a real self who remains the "I."

But though such guilty imaginings can be disguised or disowned, they must sometimes be acknowledged as faithful expressions of one's wishes. Fantasy can be, after all, not merely an escape from reality, but, like art, a way of tapping the reality of what Lawrence called one's "deep, real feelings." The point then is not that Lawrence's writing of poetry is a sublimated form of masturbation but that it is associated in his mind with secret feelings, secret fantasies, of which he need not always be aware, and that this association taints the activity and makes it somehow forbidden and forbidding.

As we would expect, Lawrence's early verse (later collected under the title Rhyming Poems) abounds with "guilty" fantasy and "criminal" desire. The clause "I wish" echoes in poem after poem, along with such variations as "I would like to," "If I could have," "If only you had," "If she would." Poems like "Last Words to Miriam" and "Reminder" confirm the assumption that Lawrence's fantasies, the more conscious ones at least, were mostly concerned with sexual fulfillment and release, usually presented in highly romanticized terms—"the moon/Never magnolia-like unfurled/Her white, her lamp-like shape" ("Reminder," 11. 28-29, CP 103).

But the "rhyming" poems betray fantasy less "innocent" than that suggested by such conventional romantic posture. "Discord in Childhood" (CP 36), a poem which Lawrence described as a fragment with the demon "fuming" in it, is of central importance in understanding Lawrence's sexual preoccupations and the anxieties they aroused. In a letter written when his mother was near death, Lawrence characterized the marriage of his parents as "one carnal, bloody fight"( CL 69). Only "Discord in Childhood" bears direct witness to this terrifying home life.

Outside the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips,
And at night when the wind rose, the lash of the tree
Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship's
Weird rigging in a story shrieks hideously.

Within the house two voices arose, a slender lash
Whistling she-delirious rage, and the dreadful sound
Of a male thong booming and bruising, until it had drowned
The other voice in a silence of blood, 'neath the noise of the ash.

CP 36)

This violent relationship between mother and father, which to a child could only be "dreadful," became for Lawrence the archetypal pattern of male-female relationships. The archetype appears in several of the "rhyming poems." It is hinted at, for instance, in the early version of "The Wild Common" (CP 894-95) with its strange bit of psychomachia in which the speaker's soul, suddenly realizing her absolute dependence on his body, "like a passionate woman turns,/Filled with remorseful terror to the man [i.e., the body] she scorned" (11. 21-22).

But "Love on the Farm" (CP 42-43), originally titled "Cruelty in Love," most clearly reveals the sado-masochistic nature of Lawrence's sexual fantasies, further liberated by the use of fiction. In this poem, a woman watches her husband move toward the farmhouse in which she waits. As he moves across the fields and through the barn, his "ominous tread" arouses terror in water hen and swallow. A rabbit spurts to flee, only to be caught by a "fine wire" around its neck, and "soon in his large, hard hands she dies." The wife too knows the terror of a helpless creature as her husband enters the room with a "smile like triumph" and the "uplifted sword/Of his hand against my bosom!" (11. 52, 54-55). She is the rabbit "caught in a snare!" (1. 59). His mouth is at her throat like "a stoat/Who sniffs with joy before he drinks the blood" (11. 62-63). He kisses her mouth, and "so I drown/Against him, die, and find death good" (11. 67-68).

Lawrence must have learned early on to associate sexuality and brutality, to find erotic excitement in the very violence he had witnessed and suffered. His was no mild demon. And he must have learned as well to identify male and female according to the role each played, tyrant or victim.

In "Love on the Farm," Lawrence adopts the perspective of the woman who submits with a voluptuous thrill to male domination and who can experience sexual satisfaction only insofar as she perceives herself as helpless. The portrait of her husband has, after all, no objective validity. It is her own deliberately fashioned, titillating fantasy. It is also Lawrence's fantasy, and bespeaks his own desire to play the female. In "Snap-Dragon" (CP 122-26), on the other hand, Lawrence assumes the role of the masterful male who finds excitement in imposing his will on the female.

I pressed the wretched, throttled flower between
 My fingers, till its head lay back, its fangs
Poised at her. Like a weapon my hand was white and keen,
And I held the choked flower-serpent in its pangs
Of mordant anguish, till she ceased to laugh.
Until her pride's flag, smitten, cleaved down to the staff.

(11. 87-92)

.....

Then I laughed in the dark of my heart, I did exult
Like a sudden chuckling of music. I bade her eyes
Meet mine, I opened her helpless eyes to consult
Their fear, their shame, their joy that underlies
Defeat in such a battle. . . .

(11. 99-103)

Clearly in playing such a role, Lawrence is identifying with his father, partly in an attempt to assert his own masculinity, and partly in an attempt to deny his weakness and vulnerability. He flaunts his fangs, and guards against the danger of castration by inflicting a castration of his own—"her pride's flag, smitten, cleaved down to the staff"² (1. 92). But the sudden note of bravado on which the poem ends reveals Lawrence's sense of guilt and the punishment he anticipates:

And I do not care, though the large hands of revenge
Shall get my throat at last, shall get it soon,
If the joy that they are lifted to avenge
Have risen red on my night as a harvest moon.³

(11. 110-113)

As everyone now recognizes, Lawrence's adolescent "shame and rage" were intensified by his peculiar family situation, and his "terror lest anybody else should have to know" the sexual thoughts and desires of the night before is in large part a terror lest his father intuit his guilty secrets. "The large hands of revenge" belong to Mr. Lawrence.

Freud's Oedipus complex aside, it is undeniable that Lawrence was bound to his mother by exceptionally strong emotional ties and saw himself, rather than his father, as her true mate. His desire for "incestuous" intimacy with his mother is most obvious in those poems that are responses to her illness and death. The bereaved son pledges his troth forever to his "darling" who "sleeps like a bride" on her bier. With his mother actually dead, fantasy is given free play as Lawrence denies her marriage to his father and she becomes, as the title of one poem suggests, "the virgin mother." But Lawrence's half-conscious desire to assert his claim on his mother and to supplant the father he hated was dangerous. Lawrence must have retained a child's terror of this man who seemed so powerful and so capable of violent revenge. In "Cherry Robbers" (CP 36), the would-be lover is identified with the "robberling" birds who have been feasting on the forbidden fruit of the cherry orchard. Sexual desire is seen as thievery, and the dead birds, "stained with red dye," lie as tokens of the danger inherent in such crime.

Denial is the other side of the coin of fantasy. A striking feature of the Rhyming Poems is the almost total suppression of any reference to Lawrence's father or to the ugliness and violence of Lawrence's home life. "Discord in Childhood" is one exception. "The Collier's Wife" (CP 46) is another. This little drama in dialect between mother and son tells again the story of the father injured in the pits. Behind Lawrence's preoccupation with this story lay the wish that his father would die: '"Lord, let my father die," he [Paul Morel] prayed very often. 'Let him not be killed at pit,' he prayed when, after tea, the father did not come home from work"( SL 60). Like Paul Morel, Lawrence must have feared the efficacy of his angry wishes.

Lawrence's attempt to deny his father is finally, futile. Though Mr. Lawrence is never mentioned in the verse, his violent presence is frequently felt, and though his embodiments are various—"large hands of revenge," "a male thong booming and bruising," the anonymous assassin of the robberling birds, the husband who "sniffs with joy before he drinks the blood"—they are all such as to strike terror into the guilty heart of a child.

Little wonder then that Lawrence was afraid of his "real poems" and fled from them as if from secret sin. He plays Oedipus with almost embarrassing obviousness. His classic desires to kill his father and marry his mother emerge clearly in the verse, as does his own infatuation with the violent and cruel. And just as Lawrence feared that a father-god would reach out of the sky to punish him for his wicked wishes, so too, at a less conscious level, he must have feared punishment for writing verse that expressed and thus, in a sense, fulfilled these very wishes. Lawrence "ran away from the act and the production" not only to avoid recognizing the demon within but also, and more importantly perhaps, to escape a violent chastisement. He fled in terror of castration, or, rather, whatever sense of personal victimization that term represents.

Unfortunately, the Oedipal formula, neat as it is, does not completely account for Lawrence's ambivalence toward the act of poetry nor for his demon. The fear of castration, which seems to be the single most powerful motive in his flight from verse, probably has its roots in a struggle even more primitive than the Oedipal. In psychoanalytic theory, an anxious fixation on the genitals seems to be symbolically linked, at least in retrospect, with the child's earliest experience of loss, the loss of intimate union with his mother. As he falls from this paradisal state into a world of new demands and denials, he becomes enraged at his mother, the agent of demands and denials. But rage at the mother, like rage at the father, brings with it the fear of retaliation; others may do to the child what he would like to do to them. Once again, bodily injury is the threat, especially to one's most valued and vulnerable parts.

Still, there is a felt need for self-assertion, and self-assertion necessitates differentiating oneself from the mother. The boy's genitals most accurately and economically symbolize that differentiation. Submission to the mother then would imply a kind of symbolic castration, even as identification with her means identifying with a "castrated" being. Thus both defiance and obedience, hate and love, carry the same danger.

The child's struggle to come to terms with this early frustration provides the prototype of all subsequent human struggles between the desire for dependency and nurturance, on the one hand, and aggressive self-assertion on the other. In Lawrence's case, as he was the first to recognize, this conflict was especially acute, and Rhyming Poems, like much of his later work, reflects two mutually exclusive desires: to be reunited with his mother and to escape and destroy her. The first is the "unmanly" wish to enjoy a passive and child-like role. In the early verse, Lawrence repeatedly voices the desire to be acted upon, to be passive, to be "drunk up," or simply to be fondled and find rest in the lap or at the breast of a maternal figure. But in one of the most moving poems of the volume, he characterizes his mother's love as a "beggar-woman," always "asking something more of me,/Yet more of me" ("End of Another Home Holiday," 11. 62-63, CP 64). And the urge, so apparent in Lawrence's writing, toward the cruel imposition of the male will suggests Lawrence's primitive rage at maternal deprivation. It suggests as well, of course, the need to master lest one be mastered, a fear that itself suggests a desire to be mastered.

Mrs. Lawrence's final illness and death made the issue of separation from the mother once again immediate. The poems on her death are often undisguised outpourings of passionate love. Yet even in these poems, charged though they are with the pain of loss, the word "free" recurs with insistent frequency. Lawrence waits

... to get
The news that she is free;
But [is] ever fixed, as yet,
To the lode of her agony.

("Suspense," 11. 10-13, CP 99)

Her release implies his own. But the angry desire to be rid of his mother is one more guilty wish betrayed by the verse, which, on that account, becomes all the more suspect, especially since that wish is in the process of being fulfilled.

Several early poems, which Lawrence revised just a few years later, show in their re-working his continuing struggle to come to terms with contradictory feelings toward his mother, and they suggest as well, how those feelings inhibited Lawrence's sexuality. In an early unpublished version of "Brother and Sister," for instance, a poem written after his mother's death, Lawrence assures his sister that "still plies the love of our mother for us, straining our way" ("To Lettice, My Sister," 1. 33, CP 941). Thus he denies her death and clings in fantasy to a child-like state of dependence, but in the later version, published in Amores, he confronts the fact of her death and urges his sister to "rise and leave her now, she will never know" (1. 30, CP 132). This realization is sad—the mother no longer looks over her children—but liberating as well—she cannot be hurt by their pursuit of life and other loves.

The revised version of "Piano" provides another example of dramatic reversal of statement. In the earlier version, never published by Lawrence, the music of the sensuous woman at the piano drowns out the memory of his mother's song (CP 943). In the revised version, first published in New Poems, Lawrence admits his mother's triumph and its crippling effect on his sexuality. His "manhood" is "cast down," as he weeps "like a child for the past" (11. 11-12, CP 148). "Piano" reminds us that Lawrence's "unmanning" is not an affliction visited from without but the product of his own burdened and burdening fantasy.

In revising "Honeymoon" (CP 933-34), Lawrence arrived at a similar insight. In the early version, Lawrence's conflicting feelings toward his mother, and by extension toward all women, are present but unacknowledged. Tortured by his lover's apparent indifference, the speaker wonders, "can the night go by . . . without once your turning/Your face toward my agony?" (1. 1, 11. 6-7), and in his agony, he longs to be touched, stripped naked, taken. Yet his own failure to act or speak is obvious. In the version entitled "Excursion Train" published in Amores two years later, the speaker admits his share of responsibility for the emotional impasse.

You hurt my heart-beat's privacy;
I wish I could put you away from me;
I suffocate in this intimacy
In which I half love you.

(11. 15-18, CP 116)

He still longs to be taken—"I ache most earnestly for your touch" (1. 33)—but he acknowledges, too, the fear of powerful intrusion, a fear that turns any woman he loves into a potential enemy, thus paralyzing his initiative and his sexuality and making real the "castration" he had hoped to avert.

. . . closely bitten in to me
Is this armour of stiff reluctancy

.....

. . . I cannot move, however much
I would be your lover.

(11. 26-27, 11. 34-35)

The poem "Forecast" (CP 91) best sums up Lawrence's horror of maternal suffocation as it describes a woman whose breasts

. . . will keep the night at bay,
Leaning in your room like two tiger-lilies, curving
Their pale-gold petals back with steady will,
Killing the blue dusk with harsh scent, unnerving
Your body with their nipple-thrust, until
You thirst for coolness with a husky thirst.

(11. 5-10)

Everywhere in the Rhyming Poems is evidence of Lawrence's desire to escape the bonds not only of mother-love, but also of chastity, the ego, conscience, school, even verse form (although his rage at limitations, external and internal, is not yet fully articulated), and all these desires can be seen as reflections of the urge to assert one's own will and individuality, to make the archetypal escape from the womb. On the other hand, one might well argue that all these bonds are simply symbolic of adulthood and its responsibilities and the desire to burst them asunder is the desire to return to an infantile condition which was amoral and sensually satisfying, a state of union with the mother before there was a sense of the self differentiated from the world, a time when one knew only the pleasures and gratifications of love and none of its demands. In short, the conflict posited has a way of reducing itself to an identity.

A similar paradox underlies the child's fear of castration. The boy's genitals distinguish him from his mother and thus become a token of his independence and "manhood." Their loss would be tantamount to loss of the self, a kind of death. At the same time, the penis is the instrument for reunion with the female. Its loss would mean final isolation, and abandonment to the impoverished and lonely state of selfhood, a death of a different sort.

In either case, the fear of castration remains the fear of being "reduced" to a woman, or, more to the point perhaps, being revealed as one.⁴ One recalls, however, that it is not just the production, the fantasy embodied in the verse, that is guilty but the act as well. The sense of abnormality Lawrence describes in recounting his first attempts at writing verse was probably caused in part by an association between the act of poetry and effeminacy. He showed his first poems to Miriam, not her farmboy brother, and later commented that "any young lady" might have written them. Then, too, as poet, Lawrence was clearly his mother's son. His father, he knew, would only scoff at or be bewildered by his work. Finally, if writing poetry was, for Lawrence, analogous in some respects to masturbation, it might be as "unmanly" as he believed masturbation to be.⁵

Late in his career, Lawrence wrote an essay in which he described the nightingale's song as "a male sound, a most intensely and undilutedly male sound." But Keats, wrote Lawrence, had projected his own sadness onto the nightingale's song. He should have had better things to do with his midnights than "cease . . . with or without pain." Poor Fanny, one "understands why she wasn't having any. Much good such a midnight would have been to her!" (P 40, 44). The mockery of Keats suggests Lawrence's own anxieties: he prefers to identify his verse with the male song of the nightingale.

In the deleted "Prologue to Women in Love," Lawrence discusses the homosexuality of Birkin, who is clearly a surrogate for Lawrence himself.

This was the one and only secret he kept to himself, the secret of his passionate and sudden spasmodic affinity for men he saw. He kept this secret even from himself. He knew what he felt, but he always kept the knowledge at bay. His a priori were: "I should not feel like this," and "It is the ultimate mark of my own deficiency, that I feel like this."

Therefore, though he admitted everything, he never really faced the question.

(P II 107)

From the beginning, an impulse toward homosexuality and a sense of his own masculine "deficiency" were potentially Lawrence's most sinful, most terrifying secrets of all.

In order for Lawrence to continue to write poetry, perhaps to write at all, he must quiet the anxieties aroused in the process. And they are many. But they all center on his need to establish a "masculine" identity. He will ward off the danger of parental castration by denying his Oedipal fantasies. He will ward off the danger of maternal castration by insisting on his self-sufficiency and justifying his own will toward domination. Both efforts require the reversal of early loyalties. He must repudiate the mother and identify with the father. Increasingly, in verse and fiction, Lawrence angrily denounces the "spiritual" woman, a caricature of his mother, and celebrates the sensual, non-intellectual man, an idealized version of his coal-miner father. His manner alters as well, as he turns away from the flaccid romanticism of much of the Rhyming Poems to cultivate a more vigorous, aggressive, sometimes sardonic style. The suspect urge toward introspection and self-exploration, which lay at the heart of his verse, is re-formulated as a "mining" of the psychic underworld, and Mr. Lawrence, a miner of a different sort and apparently the least introspective of men, is eventually associated with the demonic forces of the unconscious that inspire Lawrence's verse. As his father's son, neither "mild," nor "lovable," nor "nice," Lawrence asserts his masculinity and denies his castration. As a result, it becomes possible for him to examine and, ostensibly at least, to accept elements in his own nature that he had earlier to repress. It becomes possible for him to write.⁶

II

The conflicts revealed in Lawrence's early verse are seen again with special clarity in Pansies, a late volume which represents a regression of sorts. Lawrence wrote Pansies about three years before his death, at a time when he was already ill and sexually impotent. The loss of sexual capacity, frightening both in itself and as a harbinger of the ultimate loss of life, apparently reactivated once again his infantile anxieties. The earliest separation from the mother had been only type and precursor of the inevitable final separation. The implication of selfhood had always been death. In Pansies, Lawrence makes a last desperate effort to avert final disaster. His celebration of the phallic reaches suspicious heights as he attempts to deny the appeal of earlier, non-phallic, and therefore potentially "perverse" pleasures. Nevertheless, his desire for maternal nurturance is probably intensified by his illness. It finds clear expression in "Bowls," a short poem which reveals, too, Lawrence's grief at the loss of sexual vigor.

Take away all this crystal and silver
and give me soft-skinned wood
that lives erect through long nights, physically
to put to my lips.

(CP 427)

But, under threatening circumstances, Lawrence is less able than in his youth to acknowledge the need for "one warm, sweet room" and "a woman who loved me to rest me" (L 81-82).

Most obvious in the verse is Lawrence's need to ally himself once more with the "masculine." His sympathies are engaged by the coal-miners striking for higher wages, and he writes verse urging the working class, with whom he now chooses to identify himself, to rebel.

... . if you amount to a hill o' beans
start in and bust it all;
money, hypocrisy, greed, machines
that have ground you so small.

("Fight! O My Young Men," 11. 25-28, CP 457)

While thus associating himself with his father's world, he heaps scorn on "Willy Wet-Leg," the effete, obviously incapacitated, upperclass male and abjures all sexual relationship with the "spiritual" woman of whom his mother is his personal archetype.

To proceed from mental intimacy
to physical is just messy,
and really, a nasty violation,
and the ruin of any decent relation
between us.

("Let Us Talk, Let Us Laugh," 11. 15-19,

CP 470)

At this point in his life, when Lawrence is faced with actual loss of physical, and specifically sexual vitality, he reacts by denying with new vigor his various fantasies of union with his mother and racing headlong to join his father's forces. And though he does not stop writing poetry, the verse produced is of a peculiar kind, which some have claimed is hardly poetry at all. What concerns us here is not only the turning away from lyricism and the increased reliance on colloquialism and slang (his father's language) but also the rigid, almost mathematical structuring of the verse, suggesting as it does an obsessive need to control and order. Repression is diligently at work defending Lawrence against conscious awareness of his true fears and deep angers, although these feelings are nevertheless revealed in the verse. Its "biting" words and "dirty" words, suggesting infantile modes of expressing rage, betray the intensity of Lawrence's frustration and despair. And when he wishes, "like Tiberius," that "the multitude had only one head," so that he could "lop it off," that very multitude he has been celebrating throughout the volume, one glimpses his concealed fury at his father and the desire for appropriate revenge.

III

At the same time that Lawrence was working on Pansies, he was also revising his early verse in preparation for the publication of his Collected Poems (1928). And, of course, he was writing, too, the foreword originally intended for that volume, the essay in which he revealed the association in his mind between verse and secret sin. Even a cursory examination of Lawrence's revisions tends to confirm the state of mind suggested by Pansies. Lawrence wants to deny the "commonplace youth," that part of himself associated with the gentler virtues of spirit and mind, but also with moral inhibition, passivity, and effeminacy, and to vindicate his demon, that aggressively masculine self. The foreword to the Collected Poems is itself the most explicit expression of that desperate effort at vindication.

Of all the revised poems, "Virgin Youth" seems of particular importance given Lawrence's obsession with his genital apparatus. In rewriting this poem, Lawrence eliminated the languishing tenderness originally expressed toward his "beautiful, lonely body/Tired and unsatisfied" (11. 21-22, CP 896). But the exaggerated celebration of the masculine that he introduces in the revised version suggests merely a narcissism of a different sort. The phallus becomes a god: "Thou dark one, thou proud curved beauty! I/Would worship thee" (11. 55-56, p. 40). Although the revised poem is often wittier than the original, the solemnity of dogma distorts the whole, and we are left with the uncomfortable feeling that Lawrence has no notion how ludicrous is his plea, "Dark, ruddy pillar, forgive me!" (1. 47), that there is not, unfortunately, a trace of irony in his conclusion, "Thy tower impinges/On nothingness. Pardon me!" (11. 61-62).

In this poem, the "real say" seems the imposition of doctrine, the holiness of the phallus' affections. In "Virgin Youth," as in some other revised poems, we have not so much a falsehood giving way to a truth, as an attitude apparently truly experienced in youth yielding to a later conviction. Lawrence seems to be saying, "This is the way I should have felt," and to deny his youth its say. He is trying to rehabilitate his younger self by transforming him into a more virile figure.⁷

The attempt involves revision of both subject matter and style, best exemplified perhaps in the reworking of "Yesternight" (CP 919-20). In this poem (first published in 1910 as a section of "Night Songs"), workers tell of leaving their office at the end of the day and going out into a soft, flower-like night to which they flower open in response. Dream-like reverie permeates the verse and the characters of the men. Romanticism is rampant: the men are flowers; the street lamps, censers; the river lamps, full-blown roses; and the moon, a reddening lantern. The ebb of evening whispers of the full swell of life the men have missed, and the night offers only a kind of oblivion as consolation for their loss. They have "eaten the narcotics of night," and "forgotten the sunny apples of the day" that they had "craved to eat" (1. 26).

The revised (1928) version, "Clerks" (part of "Hyde Park at Night, Before the War," p. 70) is less languid. The contrast between the drab daytime world and the fantasy life of night is more boldly delineated. The "chambered weariness" of each man's soul has become a "chambered wilderness" from which a "spirit" wanders abroad on its explicitly sexual enterprise. No longer are the men defeated and weak. Their vitality has simply been held in abeyance during the day. Now the men are associated not with perfumed flowers, but with elephants (their phallic significance is unmistakable) who "scream aloud/For joy of the night when masters are/Asleep and a dream" (11. 10-12). The primal animal is liberated, and while the ego sleeps, the dreams of the unconscious are given full sway.

The most dramatic changes in the verse, however, are those in which the sense is even more drastically altered. "Whether or Not" (CP 921-28), "The Drained Cup" (CP 137-40), and "Two Wives" (CP 154-58) are all stories of romantic triangles involving a man and two women, one the bride of his spirit, the other the bride of his flesh. In each poem, as first published, the claims of the spirit are finally acceded to while the sensual is, at best, relegated to a position of secondary value, and, at worst, associated with the demonic. In revising these poems "to say the real say," Lawrence in each case overturned the triumph of the spiritual bride, thus vindicating the desires of the flesh. Other changes also reveal his increased antagonism toward the "spiritual" woman whom he had tended at first to treat more tenderly. Now she becomes the victim of his ironic comment, often introduced at the end of the poem:

It is well
Since I am here for so short a spell
Not to interrupt her? Why should I
Break in by making any reply!

("Passing Visit to Helen," 11. 46-49, CP 152)

In general, Lawrence's revisions confirm the movement toward the "nightingale's song." He attempts to shed what he once, in a different context, called "all my pathetic sadness and softness," and, more specifically, to free his work of archaic, stilted, or romantic diction. His language becomes more colloquial and spirited, approximating the speaking voice, while an expanded use of direct address and dialogue heightens the dramatic element. The imagery becomes more coherent, less diffuse. There is a toughening of attitude, a greater aggressiveness and variety of tone, including a bracing dash of mockery.

But while most of Lawrence's revisions reflect his insistence on the "male song," others seem to contradict this motive. "Kisses in the Train" and "Last Words to Miriam," the poems in question, anticipate the spirit of reconciliation that informs Lawrence's Last Poems.

The early version of "Kisses in the Train" describes the quiet at the center of a storm of passion:

But firm at the centre
My heart was found;
Her own to my perfect heart-beat bound.

(Love Poems version)

In the Love Poems version, the woman's heart sets the pace:

My own to her perfect
Heartbeat bound.

(11. 33-34, CP 121)

The change allows Lawrence both to assume and to admit his dependent role, analogous to that of the foetus in the womb or the baby at its mother's breast. The enemy whose power he had had to deny is becoming the friend whose strength nourishes and protects. The "good" mother is replacing the "devouring" mother.

In "Last Words to Miriam" (an ironic title for a poem so much revised), there is a similar but more extended reversal. In the earliest manuscript version (CP 930) and in the text published in Amores (CP 931-32), it is Lawrence who has awakened Miriam, has created her as his creature. Her love was "dark and thorough," but

Mine was the love of the sun for a flower
He creates with his shine.
I was diligent to explore you,
Blossom you stalk by stalk,
Till my fire of creation bore you
Shrivelling down. . . .

Amores version, 11. 4-9,( CP 931)

Through a reversal of roles in the 1928 edition, Lawrence reinterprets their relationship and acknowledges his debt to Miriam.

Mine was the love of a growing flower
For the sunshine.
You had the power to explore me,
Blossom me stalk by stalk;
You woke my spirit, you bore me
To consciousness . . .

(11. 4-9, CP 111)

Perhaps the willingness to relinquish fantasies of narcissistic omnipotence helped prepare the way for Lawrence's final confrontation with death, and for the masterful Last Poems, which issued from that confrontation. What Lawrence had feared most was castration, a deficiency that would render him impotent to act. But it was his own fantasies and fears that threatened to paralyze his capacity for action—whether the act of love or the act of poetry. Whenever, as in some of the Pansies, self-justification became his primary motive, the result was dogma, diatribe, and something less than poetry. But in accepting the human limitations on his power, Lawrence could be less afraid of the consequences of his anger, and for that very reason, or for others, was no longer so afraid of a violent retaliation.

At the end of his life, Lawrence does not necessarily deny the bitter self-knowledge he has arrived at; he seems rather to assume and then transcend it. The result is magnificent poetry. In the Last Poems, individual power is sacrificed for the sake of security in community. Lawrence becomes again like a little child and somehow—one does not know how—earns to trust in idealized parent-gods, gentle and beautiful, and in their forgiveness.

From the beginning of his career as a poet, Lawrence was committed to the search for truth, by which he seems to have meant primarily truth about the self. Art was the "medium through which men express their deep, real feelings," and poetry was the act of knowing oneself. Lawrence's earliest poems make abundantly clear the powerful desires and fears that will continue to provide the emotional impetus behind his later verse, and which, in the years that follow, he will explore with increasing frankness and self-awareness. According to Lawrence, writing poetry is the attempt not only to know but also to heal oneself. The artist, he said, creates "to get at the meaning of his own soul's anguish," "to see himself emerge," so that he can "understand his own suffering" and "go on further, leaving it" ("Christs in the Tirol," P p. 83). But the guilty discoveries made in the process are sufficient to create considerable anxiety. Here is the root of Lawrence's suspicion of literature, and, since his "unmanning" fantasies are perhaps the most threatening, here too is the source of his struggle, almost lifelong, to achieve a "masculine" art.

NOTES

¹ Lawrence's works are cited parenthetically in my text by abbreviated title, page number, and poetic line number in the following editions:

A Amores (New York: B. W. Heubsche, 1916).

CL The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking Press, 1962).

CP The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (New York: Viking Press, 1971).

FU Fantasia of the Unconscious, in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: Viking Press, Compass Book, 1960).

P Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (1936; rpt. New York: Viking Press, 1964).

P II Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking Press, 1967).

SL Sons and Lovers (New York: Viking Press, Compass Book, 1960.

SCAL Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking Press, 1961.

² "If sexual pleasure is disturbed by anxiety, it is comprehensible that an 'identification with the aggressor' . . . can be a relief. It a person is able to do to others what he fears may be done to him, he no longer has to be afraid. Thus anything that tends to increase the subject's power or prestige can be used as a reassurance against anxieties. What might happen to the subject passively is done actively by him, in anticipation of attack, to others."—Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1945), p. 354.

³ Daniel Weiss, who has written the most thorough psychoanalytic study of Lawrence's work, notes in the fiction the recurrence of "sadistic beating and retaliation by strangling."—Oedipus in Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), p. 91.

4 The fear of castration, although it no doubt has its roots in a literal fear, makes most sense when understood symbolically. It is the fear that one will be or already has been, in some absolutely essential sense, mutilated and thus rendered impotent to act, sexually or otherwise, as a whole "man" ought. But according to primitive reasoning, a mutilated man is a woman. Thus, for instance, a father who is perceived by his son as overwhelmingly powerful and dangerous has already done violence to that child's sense of himself and created in him a nagging anxiety that he is a woman.

⁵If Lawrence had a son, he would tell him, "leave yourself alone. . . . Don't you go creeping off by yourself and doing things on the sly. . . . Remember that I want you to leave yourself alone. I know what it is, I tell you. I've been through it all myself. . . . And the only thing I want of you is to be manly. Try and be manly, and quiet in yourself."—FU 146-47.

⁶ David Cavitch's psychoanalytic reading of Lawrence in D. H. Lawrence and the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) is often similar to my own. Cavitch recognizes, for instance, an "unsatisfied need for masculine identification" (p. 30) and an "excessive fear of man's aggression" (p. 128) as important sources of Lawrence's chronic anxiety. And Cavitch points out, as I do, that in Lawrence's willingness to rationalize or glorify . . . viciousness and brutality in male sexual activity" (p. 150), he "idealizes the very notion of manhood that makes masculinity frightening to him" (p. 168).

⁷ Emile Delavenay suggests, as I do, that Lawrence's revisions often seem intended to disguise rather than to expose his early feelings. But Delavenay ascribes a somewhat different motive. He asserts that Lawrence "mutilated" his early poems because by 1928, he was "much more alive to the possible clinical interpretation of his adolescent symptoms."—"D. H. Lawrence and Sacher-Masoch," DHLR, 6 (Summer 1973), 143.