The poetry of D. H. Lawrence presents an interesting problem for stylistic investigation. Nearly all critics agree that Lawrence evolved a new form; that, from a mediocre Georgian lyricist, he became a sometimes excellent free-verse lyricist. Though his mature work has been widely influential, especially in America, his poetry is often treated as an adjunct to the novels, and has received little detailed examination.

Lawrence has always been respected by his fellow poets, even when they disagree with him. Though Pound referred to the early work as "a sort of pre-raphaelitish slush, disgusting or very nearly so,"¹ he praised the dialect poems and, in a letter to Harriet Monroe, admitted, "I think he learned the proper treatment of modern subjects before I did."² Eliot, though disliking the poems themselves, wrote admiringly of Lawrence's advice to Catherine Carswell, which was that "the essence of poetry .. . is a stark directness, without a shadow of a lie, or a shadow of deflection anywhere. Everything can go, but this stark, bare, rocky directness of statement, this alone makes poetry, today."³ Eliot recognized a similarity of aims.

This speaks to me of that at which I have long aimed, in writing poetry; to write poetry which should be essentially poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry, poetry so transparent that in reading it we are intent on what the poem points at, and not on the poetry, this seems to me the thing to try for. To get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music. We never succeed, perhaps, but Lawrence's words mean this to me. . . .⁴

Eliot's quarrel with Lawrence's subject matter, however, left only W. H. Auden's The Dyer's Hand praising Lawrence for having achieved this transparency.

Contemporary poets have been more wholehearted in their approval of Lawrence, since many contemporaries trace their forms back to Lawrence's later work. Kenneth Rexroth claims that Lawrence's Look! We Have Come Through! contains "the greatest imagist poems ever written," praising Lawrence for his "uncanny, 'surreal' accuracy of perception and evaluation."⁵ The poets Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey maintain that "nothing much new has happened in English poetry since Lawrence laid down his pen and died." In the same collection, Robert Lowell ranks Lawrence's free verse with the Bible, Whitman, Pound, and Williams.⁶

Lawrence's critics are mainly apologetic in tone; Graham Hough, whose Dark Sun contains a chapter on the poetry, allows the poems to "assume the status of a running commentary to the course of development outlined in the novels" (New York: Macmillan, 1957, p. 191). The most easily available book-length treatment is Tom Marshall's The Psychic Mariner (New York: Viking, 1970), in which the poems are treated as indicative of Lawrence's psychic development, with little attention to the language of the poems. Indeed, nearly all criticism of Lawrence's poetry has tended to focus on what he was saying, rather than how he said it, discussing his poetic method in terms of delicacy, wit, irony, and vision, clearing up obscurities of imagery and emphasizing the perception of the poet.

This approach to Lawrence was made necessary by the devastating effect of "D. H. Lawrence and Expressive Form," an essay by R. P. Blackmur.⁷ Subsequent critics have found themselves in the shadow of this essay, in which Blackmur attacks the forms of poetry Lawrence used. The forms, Blackmur says, are evidence that Lawrence had fallen victim to the fallacy of expressive form, which holds that merely to verbalize an idea is to give it sufficient artistic form. This, according to Blackmur, leaves the critic without a real standard of judgment, and, by giving up regular meter, regular line length, and rhyme, the poet impoverishes his mode of expression.

.. . the strength of his peculiar insight lacks the protection and support of a rational imagination, and .. . it fails to its own disadvantage to employ the formal devices of the art in which it is couched, (p. 287)

The bias is obvious: the critic is taking the poet on the critic's terms. Whatever Lawrence's reasons for relinquishing certain of his poetic resources, the interest of the critic should be in evaluating what Lawrence does with the resources he does use, such as phonology, syntax, line ending, and rhythm. The question of expressive form can be largely discounted in a linguistic examination of the poems, especially since there exists manuscript evidence of Lawrence's extensive revisions and the testimony of Frieda Lawrence that her husband labored long and hard over his poetry. Blackmur's conviction that Lawrence believed in "expressive form" arises from a misunderstanding of Lawrence's ironic use of the term "craftsman" and his metaphoric tendency in his essays on poetry. "Poetry of the instant" does not necessarily mean poetry created in an instant; rather, Lawrence is contrasting the form he attempts to create with the geometric perfection of older forms which implies a distance in time from the subject of the "perfect" verse.

The important question raised by Lawrence's use of free verse is the nature of poetic language: How many things can be subtracted from poetic form and still leave a remainder to be called poetry? Jan Mukaøovsky's essay "Standard Language and Poetic Language" suggests that poetry, the act of arranging an utterance into lines different from prose paragraphs, "foregrounds" its language; poetic language calls attention to itself as language. "Mukafovský characterized poetic (that is, literary) language as an aesthetically purposeful distortion of standard language."⁸ The opposite of foregrounding is automatization, the use of devices which once foregrounded language but grew to be habitual. Lawrence foregoes the rhyme and meter which were automatized in his day, but his language still is foregrounded. The language of Lawrence's poetry is distorted, if simply by being titled and broken into lines and stanzas rather than paragraphs. Lawrence's worth as a poet depends upon whether or not the distortion of the language of his poetry is "aesthetically purposeful." The traditional devices that reinforce meaning—rhyme, meter, regular stanza form—Lawrence chooses not to employ, so that his poetry will not give the impression of a geometric perfection and temporal distance. This creates a free verse which is "transparent," pointing at the object or event described, but the language still announces itself; it is poetic language, and there are still resources left for the poet to manipulate so that meaning may be reinforced.

A quick survey of Lawrence's poetry, before attending closely to a particular poem, will show the shift in style and illustrate the development of specific techniques. The best known of the early poems, "The Wild Common," easily characterizes this period, and shows Lawrence struggling with an inadequate medium. His nature is not a Georgian nature, and the automatized conventions of Georgian verse do little to reinforce meaning.

Much of the verse of this period is formally indistinguishable from prose except for the intervention of the rhyme; and since there is hardly any discernible verse rhythm the lines have no existence as separate units, the rhymes mark nothing and seem curiously irrelevant. (Hough, p. 194)

Georgian rhyme schemes begin to reinforce meaning in "Lightning," a five-stanza poem with a simple ABCCBA rhyme scheme in all but one stanza. The chiasmus of the rhyme reflects the emotional progress of the persona: at first he is drawn by the girl he holds, but a lightning flash shows the grudging resignation of her face and the speaker is suddenly repelled. The point at which the emotions reverse comes exactly in the center of the central verse:

I leaned in the darkness to find her lips
And claim her utterly in a kiss,
When the lightning flew across her face
And I saw her for the flaring space
Of a second, like snow that slips
From a roof, inert with death, weeping "Not this! Not this!"⁹

This stanza also marks the only change in the rhyme scheme, which here becomes ABCCAB, possibly reflecting the emotional disequilibrium of the speaker. The language also suddenly becomes more figurative after the central lines; the first simile of the poem appears, and simile and metaphor cascade through the two final stanzas.

In "Medlars and Sorb-Apples" Lawrence discards the conventions he finds oppressive and disjoints the syntax, leaving dangling nominal phrases after the colloquial, syntactically complete opening lines. Polyptoton, the repetition of a word with varying inflections, abounds, even in the opening lines:

I love you, rotten,
elicious rottenness.

(p. 280)

The phonology serves to unify the syntactic and rhythmic disparity of the poem, with echoes, internal rhymes, assonance and alliteration: "flux . . . sucked . . . rambling sky dropped grape .. . smack of preciosity /Soon in the pussyfoot west .. . so brown and soft and coming suave . . . spasm . . . orgasm" (Marshall, p. 124). But this unity of phonology is in great contrast to the much altered syntax:

A kiss, and a spasm of farewell, a moment's orgasm of rupture,
Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning.
And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain
A new gasp of further isolation,
A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves.

(pp. 280-81)

Here, Lawrence uses no finite verbs to indicate movement or temporal succession; only the sequence markers and, then, and till. It has been suggested that the atactic nature of the poetry reflects Lawrence's vision—"rapid intuitive glimpses" (Hough, p. 206)—but here the syntax seems disjointed more for the sake of subtlety of argument. Lawrence is attempting to prove that the "morbid" flavor of medlars is emblematic of the dark gods, of Orpheus and Dionysos in the underworld, and the absence of verbs allows absence of substantives, thus generalizing the journey. This could now be the travels of Orpheus, Dionysos, a sorb-apple, or the soul after death. Proof that Lawrence has been using his vagueness as argument comes two stanzas later:

So, in the strange retorts of medlars
and sorb-apples
the distilled essence of hell.

(p. 281)

So implies that what follows is a consequence of what has preceded, but this is not really the case here; the disjointed syntax has been a rhetorical trick: we concede to an argument that really has not occurred. The tightly knit phonological effects may help lull the reader into following the argument, but syntax and phonology do not work together to reinforce a meaning; rather, they help cover the vagueness of association. The poem is important, however, in that it shows Lawrence making original use of his resources.

The syntax of the last stanzas of a sister-poem,"Almond Blossom," is more successful. The first part of the poem is a celebration of the obstinacy of the almond, blossoming in the snow; Lawrence, in long Whitmanesque lines, compares the almond first to iron, then to the history of the race, finally to the race's sufferings as particularized in Christ. Finally the poem ends with an apostrophe to the almond blossom which modulates into description:

Oh, honey-bodied beautiful one
Come forth from iron,
Red your heart is.
Fragile-tender, fragile-tender life-body,
More fearless than iron all the time
And so much prouder, so disdainful of reluctances.

(p. 306)

This stanza, like those that follow, is composed of appositive after appositive, all repetitive variations of particular adjectives. The effect is that the syntax approximates the unfolding blossom (note that the inversion above places the heart-color of the blossom in the heart of the sentence); attribute after attribute is unfolded like the petals of the blossom. The phonological effects depend upon the repetition of key adjectives, and occasionally the effects are spectacular.

In the distance, like hoar-frost, like silvery
ghosts communing on a green hill,
Hoar-frost-like and mysterious.

(p. 306)

Inside the unfolding syntax and the multiplying similes, the phonological chiasmus of "hoar-frost" and "like," with its subtle syntactic alteration, is mimetic of the blossom's heart, "red at the core," unfolding even while the outer petals are still moving.

The pattern is repeated to the end of the poem, with slight variations. Intermittent repetition occurs in:

Unpromised,
No bounds being set.
Flaked out and come unpromised . . .

Another complex chiasmus occurs in this stanza:

Knots of pink, fish-silvery
In heaven, in blue, blue heaven,
Soundless, bliss-full, wide-rayed, honey-bodied,
  Red at the core,
Red at the core,
Knotted in heaven upon the fine light.

(p. 307)

Here the chiasmus is between ideas; the syntax changes. Expressed schematically as ABBA, item Bx (the heart of the blossom) is syntactically the same in its two repetitions, but Item A, the comparison of the blossoms to heaven-knots, appears once as a noun phrase and once as a participial phrase. In addition, more attributes are unfolded with the compound adjectives between the first appearance of A and B. Thus Lawrence plays with the basic device of mimetic syntax like a composer with a four-note theme, subtly altering it in each instance. He closes the poem with a polyptoton, a play on one of his characteristic combination adjectives.

And red at the core with the
last sore-heartedness,
Sore-hearted-looking.

(p. 307)

The ability to use syntax, line length, and rhythm to force his language to be transparent to its referent becomes Lawrence's strongest resource. "Snake," his best known poem, is famous for just this effect.

In "Snake".. . no one sensitive to the rhythms of English speech can fail to observe the lovely fluidity of movement (like that of the snake itself) .. . the rhythm trembles on the verge of regular iambic for a line or two, then lapses into a loose conversational run. (Hough, p. 207)

Both the rhythms and the insistent sibilants have been often noted, but the less-noticed syntax also adds to the poem's meaning. The opening lines are mimetic:

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

(p. 349)

In one sense, the syntax helps diminish the importance of the persona; the phrase "and I in pyjamas for the heat" contains no finite verb and thus cannot be syntactically related to "To drink there," and the and reduces the human to the equal of the adverbial; in effect, the persona becomes a modifier, part of the environment. This idea is repeated in

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

(p. 349)

Here again, the human receives second-class treatment; the absence of a finite verb allows the static participle to change the human into a fact, a passive bit of environment, while the snake acts through a full verb.

In another sense, the first two lines of the poem are mimetic; since the infinitive phrase is separated from the word it modifies by three other phrases, three comma pauses, and two line-end pauses, the tendency is to relate it to the nearer subject, the human. Since this is logically possible, the referential mechanisms of the syntax are actually coiled upon themselves. In fact, if Lawrence had not used a similar image to describe "poetry of the past," one would be tempted to say the sentence "has its tail in its mouth."

Similar effects are achieved, at least momentarily, in another Birds Beasts and Flowers piece, "Fish." In this poem, while the persona, speaking in long lines of varied rhythm, maintains that the life of a fish cannot be understood or appreciated by man, the poet uses short choppy lines and rhythms to express the fish's "wave-bound being" (Marshall, pp. 138-40). Syntax and phonology are also employed here to mimic the movements of the fish, and the sounds and movements of water:

Whether the waters rise and cover the earth.

(p. 334)

The phonology of this line reflects the action described: the movement inside "waters rise" is an upward movement, from a low back vowel to a high front vowel with a high off-glide. The flatness of a world covered with water is reflected in "cover the earth," with its monotonous reduced vowels.

A lexical chiasmus prepares the reader for the more spectacular effects to follow:

Aqueous, subaqueous,
Submerged
And wave-thrilled.

(p. 334)

The movement from surface to sub-surface and back again, with the quick motion of the short lines, mimics the fish's movements in the sea. A syntactic chiasmus further develops this theme:

As the waters roll
Roll you.

(p. 335)

The movement from the doubled verb in opposite directions mimics the effects of a wave upon a fish. Furthermore, the reversal in the second line seems to place the fish in a passive position, accepting his oneness with the water, an idea that is developed in the phonological repetitions:

The waters wash,
You wash in oneness
And never emerge.

(p. 335)

Phonology also mimics the fish's life in

Your life a sluice of sensation along your sides,
A flush at the flails of your fins down the whorl of your tail
And water wetly on fire in the grates of your gills.

(p. 335)

The fricatives and sibilants of the first line echo the sound of water rushing along the fish's scales; in the second line, the repetition of the initial consonant cluster combines with another fricative to mimic the swishing movements of the fish's tail. The repetition of liquids, fricatives, and on-glides throughout the poem give a wet atmosphere. "Whorl" is an interesting word in this stanza; spelled as it is here, it is onomatopoetic in a strange way. The points of sound production move in a whorl when the word is pronounced, from the front of the mouth to the rear of the palate, back to the front for the alveolar closure.

One of the most successful uses of the compound is

You and the naked element,
Sway-wave.

(p. 335)

The syntax is ambiguous, allowing the compound "sway-wave" to be either verb or modifier; either way, it perfectly reflects the fish's movement (the syntactic ambiguity may be an advantage). The short line with two stresses gives the impression of quick movement, combining the "wave" of water with the "sway" of the fish in a reciprocal relationship. The phonology, clustered around the same vowel-glide combination, is a miniature of the whole poem's phonology, combining swishing sibilants and fricatives with watery glides.

Another resource of poetic language Lawrence manipulates is the tension between line length and syntax; this is illustrated in the first stanzas of "The Elephant Is Slow to Mate," a poem whose lingering, halting pace points to the patience of the elephants.

The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste, they wait

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds and drink and browse

and dash in panic through the brake of forest with the herd . . .

(p. 465)

The last line of each stanza creates an odd rhythmic effect. The rhyme word of each line rhymes perfectly with the rhyme of the complementary line, creating a sense of finality which is abetted by the fact that each of the rhyme words receives a strong accent. A tension is set up with this finality since each final line seems syntactically complete, but after a stanza-end pause the reader learns that the line is yet to be completed.

This tension is necessary for the success of "Bombardment," a short Imagist piece and one of Lawrence's most successful poems. The poem is free of Whitman's influence, and Lawrence uses all the resources surveyed thus far:

The town has opened to the sun.
Like a flat red lily with a million petals
She unfolds, she comes undone.
A sharp sky brushes upon
The myriad glittering chimney-tips
As she gently exhales to the sun.

Hurrying creatures run
Down the labyrinth of the sinister flower.
What is it they shun?

A dark bird falls from the sun.
It curves in a rush to the heart of the vast
Flower: the day has begun.

(p. 166)

Nearly all the techniques discovered in the brilliant moments of Lawrence's other poems are combined here to make this poem very nearly perfect. The tone is colloquial, conversational; there are no emotional exclamations, yet the language of everyday speech is combined with the resources of poetic language to make this poem, more than any other of Lawrence's except "Snake," transparent to the thing described.

In the first stanza, chiming sounds help unify the lines; the metaphor of town and flower is announced flatly in the first line, and Lawrence demonstrates again a favorite effect, approximating the opening of a blossom by repetitive, balanced syntax. The line "like a flat red lily with a million petals" divides with a syntactic juncture between the two phrases and precisely in the center of the line. The repetition "she unfolds, she comes undone" emphasizes the slow continuity of the movement and the nasals slow the line, as do the heavy accents upon the low central vowels—all producing a line monotonously flat and doubled, as line 2 described the "flower" itself.

The phonology of stanza two is mimetic. The alliteration of "sharp sky brushes" uses fricatives and the consonant cluster /sk/ to produce the sound of brushing against all the high front vowels of "the myriad glittering chimneytips." The "dying fall" of the town's breath "as she gently exhales to the sun" is produced by the vowel movement within the line, from the high front vowel of she to the mid front of ex- to the low central vowel of sun. The same pattern occurs throughout stanza three with the high front vowels of "hurrying creatures" moving to low central in "run," with a similar pattern in "sinister flower." All the movement in the poem is downward or flattening out, and the poem seems to be dominated by low, reduced, or low back vowels.

The slow pace of the poem continues until line 11. The slowed pace comes from the lack of tension between line endings and syntax, since seven of the twelve lines are end-stopped, syntactically complete. Eight of the twelve lines end on a heavily stressed syllable with a terminal nasal, a continuant. Three of the other lines end in other continuants: liquids or fricatives. Only one line ends with a phonological stop, a sound which cannot be continued indefinitely; the line is

It curves in a rush to the heart of the vast. . .

(p. 166)

With this line, Lawrence speeds up the rhythm of the poem, matching the swoop of the dark "bird" falling from the sun. The heavy stresses and irregular rhythms are suddenly changed; only "curves" receives a heavy stress, forming an iambic foot. The rest of the line is composed of extremely fast anapests with light stresses on the third syllable in each. The only stop in a terminal position also marks the most extreme enjambment in the poem; the other lines which are not end-stopped are stopped at syntactic junctures between phrases, but this line ending separates a noun and its modifier. The effect speeds up the rhythm even more, forcing a quick movement to "flower." Here, however, as the bird's quick flight would end, so does the fast rhythm end. The "flat" low and reduced vowels of "flower" are stopped short by the colon, marking the only major syntactic juncture to occur within a line in "Bombardment," and this is a juncture preceded by an unstressed syllable, making any performance of the juncture sound even longer than a juncture preceded by a stress. The line continues, anticlimactically, to end in another heavily stressed nasal.

In this poem, a short tour de force, Lawrence achieves an intensity of effect often missing from his longer poems, but "Bombardment" illustrates the characteristic uses he makes of language. Lawrence was "a major poet groping his way towards the discovery of a new kind of poetic art"¹⁰ and, like Wordsworth, he wrote "a good deal of bad poetry," but in some Lawrence poems he did discover and use his new kind of poetic art. In poems like "Bombardment," some of Pansies, such as "November by the Sea," and in the Last Poems Lawrence uses the resources of poetry—those left after ridding himself of automatized conventions—to support his meanings. What is left is bare language, with the resources of everyday language aesthetically and purposefully distorted to make the language, by calling attention to itself, actually become transparent to its referent.

NOTES

¹ Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 387.

² Ezra Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 52-53.

³ D. H. Lawrence, Collected Letters, ed. Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking, 1962), p. 413.

⁴ F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (London: Oxford, 1958), 3rd ed., pp. 89-90.

⁵ Kenneth Rexroth, "Introduction," in D. H. Lawrence, Selected Poems, ed. Kenneth Rexroth (New York: Viking, 1959), pp. 1-23.

⁶ Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey, ed., Naked Poetry (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. xii, 124.

⁷In Language as Gesture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935).

⁸ Donald C. Freeman, "Linguistic Approaches to Literature," in Linguistics and Literary Style, ed. Donald C. Freeman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 6-8. The Mukaøovský essay appears on pp. 40-56.

⁹ D. H. Lawrence, Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (New York: Viking, 1971), rev. ed., p. 62. All references to Lawrence's poetry are to this edition.

¹⁰Pinto, "Introduction" to Complete Poems, p. 21.