The speaker of the "Hymn to Priapus," like the speakers in all the other lyrics in D. H. Lawrence's volume of poems entitled Look! We Have Come Through!, may be taken to be Lawrence himself. He tells us he "danced at a Christmas party/Under the mistletoe"

Along with a ripe, slack country lass
Jostling to and fro.

At the dance or, more likely, after the dance, the country lass "slipped through" the speaker's "arms on the threshing floor," where he found her "Sweet as an armful of wheat." As if words like "armful" and images of "threshing" a "ripe . . . country" woman on the "floor" were not explicit enough to convince us of what has transpired, Lawrence plays blasphemously with Christ's words at the Last Supper. She "was broken, was broken/For me, and ah, it was sweet," Lawrence says, making absolutely clear the fact that "this is [her] body" that the "big, soft country lass" has broken for the remission of his appetites.

Lawrence leaves the barn (as well as the woman) behind, and as he goes home through a silent country landscape he feels "Fulfilled" but also "alone." Part of that feeling of loneliness seems to stem from guilt and even a feeling that some sin has transpired, a fact suggested rather obviously through the presence of words like "commission," somewhat more subtly and potently through the speaker's representation of the constellation Orion as a father figure. He sees "the great Orion standing/Looking down," the "witness" of his "first beloved/Love-making" (which in Lawrence, after Freud, could refer to a child's Oedipal affair). Orion

Now sees . . . this as well,
This last commission.
Nor do I get any look
Of admonition.
He can add the reckoning up
I suppose, between now and then,
Having walked himself in the thorny, difficult
Ways of men.

Having partaken of the sensual fulfillments offered by a rustic woman and wondered if his father would have words of "admonition," the speaker lapses in the later stanzas of the poem into thoughts of his mother, that sweeter, better love who now

. . . lies underground
With her face upturned to mine,
And her mouth unclosed in the long last kiss
That ended her life and mine.¹

"She fares in the stark immortal/Fields of death," Lawrence bitterly complains, and "I in these goodly, frozen/Fields. . . . "² She is a Proserpine, Lawrence implies, only she is a Proserpine lost forever to Plutonian darkness. He, the "frozen" inhabitant of sterile "fields," is powerless to bring her to light or love again.

This love for that which Lawrence is powerless to bring back, in turn, breeds a powerful, secondary form of impotence. Any man who spends his time after lovemaking thinking morbid thoughts of his unforgettable mother has clearly not been "fulfilled" by his sexual experience as an adult, no matter what he may claim to the contrary. The impossible love for the mother, as symbolized by the deathbed kiss, seems to have rendered the poet incapable, for a while at least, of enjoying his own loves in his own time. It has, indeed, turned the course of his life against life itself:

Something in me remembers
And will not forget.
The stream of my life in the darkness
Deathward set.

I take this stanza to refer, in part, to the returning memory of that "long last kiss/That ended her life and mine." If we suspect, however, that the reference is also to the moment of the poet's own conception, the sexual act between father and mother that brought him into being, the import of the stanza is little changed. For to be so burdened by the past that coitus triggers "memories" of one's own conception is to be a man always driven by reality back into the womb and into the world of the deep, parental past, now quiet like Orion in the blackness of the heavens, now peaceful and still in the "stark immortal fields of death" that stretch beyond the reach of our "frozen/Fields."

One thing is sure. The poem, whatever else it may be, doesn't seem much of a "Hymn to Priapus." The poem hardly can be said to celebrate the sexual relationship abandoned after only three stanzas, and however much Lawrence might hold to a neo-Freudian view of the family, we can hardly suppose that "Priapus" is a figure for the relationship which the poem seems more interested in and certainly talks in more "hymnal" language about, the love between mother and son. Where, then, is Lawrence taking us? What has he written a poem about?

It is only when we consider the fact that the poem associates the mother figure with an immortal, controlling influence over the life of the son, when we realize that the imagery of the poem ("underground," "fields of death") associates the mother with the goddess Proserpine, when we recall that Swinburne, whom Lawrence once called our greatest poet,"³ wrote not a "Hymn to Priapus" but a "Hymn to Proserpine," and when we remember that the elder poet's hymn treated the subject of two kinds of love, one current but dead—it is only then that we begin to realize what we are encountering in the "Hymn to Priapus." This is a poem that becomes compelling only when we see it interplaying with other poems. Through his title, Lawrence might lead us to expect a poem that is a paean to a simple and primal urge. After we have studied the lines following, however, we take the title as an illustrative admission. The "Hymn to Priapus" is a revisionary "Hymn to Proserpine" that half develops and half covers over the traces of a Victorian original. That is the work, Lawrence makes us realize, that has first to be done before any convincing hymns to sexual being can be sung.

In Swinburne's powerful poem, the speaker, upon the proclamation in Rome of the Christian faith, weeps for the passing of the old, Olympian order (whose gods, once "fair," are now "broken"). He also decries the elevation of a new, pale, son of man who is now "crowned in the city" but whose "days are bare" and "device is barren" to a man raised a passionate devotee of those older, more majestic deities who were "more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep." The speaker especially laments the passing of Proserpine,

our mother, a blossom of flowering seas,
Clothed round with the world's desire as with
raiment, and fair as the foam,
And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess and Mother of Rome.

Who or what has replaced this "mother" of "desire" in the new scheme of things? A mere girl, Mary, a mere "maiden men sing as a goddess" and have "crowned . . . where another was queen."

In despair, with no object worth desire or devotion in the present and no viable goddess of love left over from the previous epoch, the speaker admits that his life, nurtured in a time and in a view of things now forever past, is now meaningless. "I am sick of singing" and "fain" only "to rest," the Swinburnian speaker sighs (for Swinburne, too, was raised on faiths which were, in his lifetime, "dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day"). He longs only for "sleep"; he would "look to the end," the time in which he will forever join the "hidden head" of Proserpine in "death." "I will go," he says, "as I came," to "abide" in the "earth" with "my mother." In a companion poem, entitled "The Garden of Proserpine," Swinburne associates this death and this mother with "Pale beds of blowing rushes/Where no leaf blooms or blushes," and he ends his prayer in the garden on a note of thanks

That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea.

Swinburne's Proserpine poems would seem to be important sources of Lawrence's images, themes, and larger poetic structures in the "Hymn to Priapus." The elder poet's characterization of life as a weary flow from origins to the finality of death informs both Lawrence's memory of that "stream of [his] life in the darkness . . . set" and his lament, which may ultimately be an anxious hope, that his parents will "rise up never," will never return to repossess him, to offer "admonition," to "add the reckoning up." The dead mother who is also a lover and a deity, who "fares in the stark immortal/Fields of death" with her "underground . . . face upturned" to her son's, clearly descends from Swinburne's Proserpine, at once a mother and goddess of desire whose "head" is now "hidden" in death, in a "Pale" garden where "no leaf blooms or-blushes." Lawrence's poem, like Swinburne's, is founded upon a structure of diametrical opposition: there are two women representing two kinds of love, one available but unmeaningful, the other, maternal one "Clothed round with . . . desire" but out of present reach. The speakers of both poems, caught between an unrecallable past and an unfulfilling present, live in memory. Each of them, consequently, tends to see life as a flow from origins towards death.

There are still more parallels to be drawn. In Swinburne's hymn, "love is sweet for a day" but soon "grows bitter"; Lawrence says of his bliss on the "threshing floor," "Ah, it was sweet," but soon he thinks of his "first beloved/Lovemaking" and remembers that it soon became a "bitter-sweet/Heart-aching." Lawrence completes the symbolism Swinburne began by associating his minimally loved country lass with wheat (she's an "armful of wheat") and even with the "bread" of Christ's body ("was broken/For me"). (Swinburne had associated his most dearly loved mother with "green grapes" in order to contrast her with Christ, from whose blood the "Sweet . . . wine" of mercy and sacrifice is made.) The important thing for the reader to be aware of, however, is not the number of echoes, parallels, and debts but, rather, the reason for their existence. Lawrence intends to discuss, poetically, the situation of being torn between two sensibilities, two visions of things (Look! We Have Come Through, as its title indicates, is a volume about the arduous struggle for emergence, spiritual and aesthetic). Swinburne, in his Proserpine poems, gave him a poetic system with which to do so. Through appropriation of Swinburne's poetic structure Lawrence can make the following claim through an unstated but powerful analogy: mere sexual experience with a "ripe" country lass at a "Christmas dance" is, for him, for the moment, as pale, grey, empty—even barren—as the living cult of the Galilean, Christ, was to the speaker of Swinburne's hymn, raised in adoration of a beautiful old goddess whose time has passed, nurtured in a world that now lies dead and buried.

Swinburne thus provides Lawrence with a poetic model for talking about his own inability to emerge fully from adolescence into adulthood, from an old sensibility into a new one. Swinburne is not, however, the only Victorian to inform Lawrence's "Hymn." Indeed, Thomas Hardy's very different kind of poetry, which in many ways proves the more challenging source of inspiration for Lawrence, must be faced off against or even married to the Swinburnian strain of Victorian lyric if Lawrence is to come through, if he is to generate the much-needed new ethos.

The scene (and the earthy, erotic world of being it represents) that Lawrence suddenly drops in stanza five of the "Hymn to Priapus" and thus leaves curiously unfulfilled and incomplete is one that can be found energetically set forth in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In that novel, Hardy describes a barn dance attended by villagers and farmhands of the Trantridge region:

Through this floating fusty debris of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen, the muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit with which the measure was trodden out. They coughed as they danced, and laughed as they coughed. Of the rushing couples there could barely be discerned more than the high lights—the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs chasing nymphs—a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing.⁴

The passage from Tess, certainly, is enough to suggest that Hardy was the first-comer to the world of the barn and to its sensual, country Lotises, that Lawrence is thus a son with a juvenile passion for something that isn't his. If Hardy is the "Priapus" that never "fails" in his rustic relations, a procreative force in a primeval world, then Lawrence, as a second-generation barnyard guest, proves to be something of an Oedipal "dancer." The "country lass" and the dead mother are thus, in a horrible sense, psychologically inseparable, a fact which may suggest that Lawrence suspects here, even more fearfully than in later works that all his attempts at new creation begin in incest, that the words and things out of which he would attempt to bring or make something original are always his own parents.

The passage from Tess, however, is not the most convincing, let alone the exclusive, evidence of Hardy's most powerful precedence. In the process of examining all the Swinburnian images, myths, and diametrical patterns present in Lawrence's poem, we may have felt that the "Hymn to Priapus" doesn't look or sound or feel very much like Swinburne. Take a stanza like

Something in me remembers
And will not forget.
The stream of my life in darkness
Death ward set!

This sounds somewhat less like Swinburne's

Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the
seasons that laugh or that weep;
For these give joy and sorrow; but thou,
Proserpine, sleep

than like one "Ditty" by Thomas Hardy—

Upon that fabric fair
"Here is she!"
Seems written everywhere
Unto me!

or another:

And we were left alone
As Love's own pair;
Yet never the love-light shown
Between us there!

Face unto face, then, say,
Eyes my own meeting,
Is your heart far away,
Or with mine beating?

Yet, Dear, though one may sigh,
Raking up leaves,
New leaves will dance on high—
Earth never grieves!⁵

On closer inspection, we find that what Lawrence has in fact done is to compromise the very regular, anapestic hexameter couplets of Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine" with Hardy's looser stanza form. If we rewrite the following ABAB quatrain from Lawrence's "Hymn to Priapus,"

He can add the reckoning up
I suppose, between now and then,
Having walked himself in the thorny, difficult
Ways of men,

in the form of a rhyming couplet, the secondary presence of Swinburne begins to be noticeable:

He can add the reckoning up I suppose, between now and then,
Having walked himself in the thorny, difficult ways of men,

Swinburne's presence, nonetheless, remains secondary, not just because it is only felt when Lawrence's lines are so altered but also because it is the meaning and implications of Hardy's art—not his rhythms—that preoccupy the later poet in the "Hymn to Priapus." One of Hardy's Wessex Poems that Lawrence no doubt knew well, "The Dance at the Phoenix," tells the tale of a woman whose girlhood "had hardly been/A life of modesty"; by sixteen she had known half the "troopers of/The King's-Own Cavalry." At age sixty, lying in bed next to the sleeping husband to whom she has always been faithful, she hears some soldiers making merry at "The Phoenix Inn." "'Alas for chastened thoughts!'" she says, and soon she has left the house, her "springtide blood" aflow. Hardy describes her ensuing night of "unchastening," her re-entry into the life of her youth (like a Lawrentian Phoenix rising from its ashes even as it dies), through the metaphor of "dancing." She "soared and swooped" until the

chime went four,
When Jenny, bosom-beating, rose
To seek her silent door.

Because such moments of ecstasy have no place in what we deem mature life, because the social repercussions that will inevitably follow such a night's revelry would end the old woman's life as she has come to know it, morning finds Jenny dead.

Hardy published a number of other poems about "dancing," most of them in the same volume, Time's Laughingstocks, in 1909 (the year of Swinburne's death and three years before Lawrence composed his "Hymn"). "The Night of the Dance" describes a man's anticipation of festivities to come in an old "thatch" barn where "sparrows flit" and "owls . . . whoo from the gable[s]." He seems to sense that "Sweet scenes are impending here" (Lawrence will later say "Ah, it was sweet!") and "That She will return" his vows tonight in "Love's low tongue." As the speaker thinks these amorous thoughts and awaits the anticipated hour, it would seem, he thinks, that "The cold moon . . . centers its gaze on me." Like the "star" that "witness[es]" Lawrence's doings and thoughts,

The stars, like eyes in reveries,
Their westering as for a while forborne,
Quiz downward curiously.

"After the Club Dance," another and perhaps the most important influence on the "Hymn to Priapus" that can be found in Hardy's 1909 volume, is the narrative of a woman walking home alone from a rural dance. There she, like the "soft country lass" of Lawrence's poem, has "been broken" for some fellow. And he, it now seems, blames her for allowing him the pleasure he himself sought:

Black'on frowns east on Maidon
And westward to the sea,
But on neither is his frown laden
With scorn, as his frown on me!

At dawn my heart grew heavy,
I could not sip the wine,
I left the jocund bevy
And that young man o'mine.

The roadside elms pass by me—
Why do I sink with shame
When the birds a-perch there eye me?
They too have done the same!

The poet delivers his ironic commentary indirectly through the confused mind of the girl. She is an "innocent" in the way that Tess Durbeyfield is, for Hardy, "A Pure Woman." She knows—or thinks she knows—her indulgences to be perfectly natural. What is more, she knows her "young man" has "done the same" as she. She cannot understand why pleasure should turn to "scorn" and why her spirits, recently high, should now have to "sink with shame." Whether or not the last, exclamatory line of the poem is a triumph for the speaker is not clear. But the poet's triumph is: Hardy's ironic structure celebrates natural energies and scorns those perverse laws of society which would always identify as corrupt their manifestation.

Thus, although several poems by Hardy together with Swinburne's Proserpine poems can be seen providing some of the poetic building blocks of Lawrence's "Hymn," Hardy is far more to the poem than a way of expressing, analyzing, and coming to terms with life, an artistic problem, or both. He is, rather, the reason why terms need to be come to. In generating a sensibility, a world-view, he generated the crisis Lawrence's poem depicts, responds to, and in a sense is. That sensibility—an appreciation for the sensual, for the quick throb of the physical in everything—is one that Lawrence is greatly compelled by: this much we know from his criticism of Shelley, who, according to Lawrence was primarily a bloodless, bodiless abstraction.⁶ What we see in the "Hymn to Priapus," however, is that Lawrence fears that he, himself, may be something of an old-fashioned, asensual abstraction. How, then, is Lawrence to continue the work that Hardy began? How is he to develop Hardy?

Hardy's poem about the old woman who thrills to "The Dance at the Phoenix," like Lawrence's "Hymn to Priapus," relates the dances of sex and death. But where Lawrence's poem is threatened by morbidity, Hardy's is witty and satiric. The "death" of Jenny, after all, cleverly signifies on the one hand a renewed, orgasmic intensity of life and, on the other, the killing guilt which society instills. Hardy's Jenny, like the speaker of Lawrence's poem, might seem to want to revivify a dead past, but the important difference is this: whereas Jenny's search for a dead past becomes an intensely living present, Lawrence's plunges him into gloomy thoughts of a love lost to time. The treatment of incest in Lawrence's poem is reminiscent of Hardy's somewhat quieter exploration, and again the predecessor manages a brighter tone. At "The Dance at the Phoenix," young men dance in high spirits and reckless abandon with a woman their "fathers" once "knew," a woman old enough to be their mother. At Lawrence's Christmas dance, the poet's subliminal recognition that his dance follows the same steps that his father's did (whether or not one accepts the suggestion that Lawrence has been the guest of a barn and a girl to whom Hardy was the original "Priapus") causes him to drown his poem in guilt and self-consciousness unknown to Hardy's more ebullient ballad.

Or take "The Night of the Dance." Hardy's ballad is excited, optimistic, poetic foreplay to the "sweet scene" to come, the dance in which "She will return" the speaker's love in "Love's low tongue." (Even the "gaz[ing]" moon and "quiz[zing]" stars reflect the protagonist's present "curious[ity]," not doubts or questions about the past or the future). Lawrence, by positioning a poem seven or eight hours in time after the setting of the poem Hardy had published some three years earlier, opts for a postclimatic scenario that betrays his lack of optimism, his mixed feelings, about both the sensual dance and the sensual poetry he would enjoy.

In the "Hymn to Priapus," then, Lawrence would seem at once to repress and indulge a fear. The fear is that rather than proving his own poetic viability by recalling and developing poetic history, he takes one step forward only to fall two steps back to the position of Swinburne, whose "new words" were responsible for pointing Hardy (by Hardy's own admission) on the way of his own poetic quest.⁷ Is the fear, however, fully justified? It seems so only if we compare Lawrence's "Hymn" to Hardy's poems about dancing. If we compare it to any of the number of poems about dead or dying mothers that Hardy had published in the dozen years before Lawrence began writing the "Hymn to Priapus," however, a very different answer emerges.

Writing some fifty years after Wordsworth's Prelude had made the mother into a symbol of a vastly meaningful and morally nourishing world, Hardy gives voice to a mother who regrets that man ever dreamed of a Nature so vastly meaningful and beneficent.⁸ He gives voice to a Nature, in other words, which regrets that she was ever conceived as a mother who could speak to, irradiate, exalt man and his moral sense. She deplores the fact that for years man insisted on seeing her "sun as a Sanctshape," her "moon as the Night-queen," her "stars as august and sublime." His "mountings of mindsight," the "range of his vision," now reach so high that, the saddened mother laments, man only "finds blemish / Throughout my domain." So, she declares,

Let me grow, then, but mildews and mandrakes,
And slimy distortions,
Let nevermore things good and lovely
To me appertain.

Hardy's poem, entitled "The Mother Mourns," describes a fictional mother dying, a man-projected mother who was thought to reflect man's highest hopes and most fanciful dreams, a "Nature" who was once for more than just some "country lass" to be "broken" for man but who is now as carelessly used as she once was revered and exalted. ("My species are dwindling," Hardy's mother protests before she lapses into silence; "my forests are barren," my "leopardine beauties are rarer / My tusky ones vanish.") In coming to a Hardy piece like "The Mother Mourns" from a poem such as the "Hymn to Priapus," we suddenly become dissatisfied enough with the literary anxiety that permeates one level of Lawrence's work to look beyond it and discover a deeper level of significance. Anyone, after Lawrence, who considers carefully the Hardyan "Mother," whether specifically in this particular poem or generally in any one of the elder author's many lyrics treating once-worshiped deities or ideals, can't help feeling it an oversimplification to state that Hardy's attitude towards the mothering past is that it is mordant and that we are well-rid of it and its fictions. The more we look at a lyric like "The Mother Mourns" the more we decide that its sensibility is more deeply ambivalent than Lawrence's own. After all, Lawrence speaks in his own voice and admits, though he laments, the passing of a maternal sensibility. But doesn't Hardy, by letting his "Mother" deliver her own lament and sing her own swan song, put himself in a terribly compromised position? Although he admits that his mother may speak no divine messages, he will not give up on the idea that she may still speak to man. Although he lets his mother confess that man's mind far eclipses nature's dumb indifference, he also gives her the tone of a miffed deity critical of man, an insulted goddess who will write on the tablets of an inspired poet.

Lawrence, by remembering Thomas Hardy and protesting, implicitly, his own insufficiency in a work like the "Hymn to Priapus," sends us into the texts of the precursor with a particular point of view that allows or causes us to see them in a new light. Thinking of Lawrence's own predicament, we are led to realize that his forerunner's lyrics turn from and yet, in the last analysis, sneak back towards an old romantic sensibility considerably more quickly (if considerably less obviously) than do Lawrence's own. The "anxiety" of a poem such as the "Hymn to Priapus" thus unmakes itself by positing the Hardyan source. As it does so it propels us into a whole new awareness of Thomas Hardy's world-view, Lawrence's interreactions with it, and the nature of the emerging—and emergent—results.

I have spoken of Hardy's "Mother" poems as if they were the point at which Lawrence jolts us into a critical reassessment of Hardy's sensibility. My choice is, of course, arbitrary. Another reader might first experience a revisionary recollection during contemplation of some of the images and terms that are absent in Lawrence's poem but that are to be found in Hardy's description of the barnyard dance in Tess, namely, débris, vegeto-human, trodden, coughing, indistinctness, and failing. Still another might become aware of these images after first being made aware, by the authorial-philosophical perspective of the "Hymn to Priapus," of the total absence of such a viewpoint in "After the Club Dance," the poem in which a young girl asks why she should feel guilty for having indulged in an activity that all Nature takes delight in. Does Hardy's artistic decision to present no more than a young girl's half-guilty questions derive from his own strong convictions of her innocence? Or does his reluctance to speak a line in his own voice grow out of a simultaneous willingness and inability fully to leave behind the punitive values of the age that bore him?

The significant fact about Lawrence's poem, then, has little to do with whether the doubts it may raise about Hardy stem primarily from its differences with one old "dancing" passage or another. It has little to do with whether the view Lawrence affords us of Hardy's living Romantic "Mother" causes, is caused by, or is simultaneous with the questions we may find ourselves raising about the depths of Hardy's earthly sensuality. The important revelation made by the "Hymn to Priapus," rather, is that its author's failure to extend the path Hardy began to cut is not due to any lack of artistic power or modern spirit. The most profound cause of Lawrence's retreat from the Hardyan sensibility (and the attitude towards the sexual partner it might entail), rather, is the critical assessment of that sensibility by the more modern poet's central self, the poet's act of understanding that although in Hardy there are developable elements of a modern sensibility, the Hardyan sensibility as it stands is not the way of the future. Lawrence has sensed that to make sexual encounter into a more simple, natural indulgence than it has been, or to imply that but for Christian society and its muddle-headed ideas the Tess Durbeyfields of the world should have no serious misgivings about what happens in barns or under the darkness of the primeval trees, may be to bring more Priapan enjoyment into a Victorian world but it is not to offer a new world-view. To intimate that the coming together of a man and a woman is analogous to a madcap dance at the Phoenix or a tying up of the garter before "jog[ging] on again" down "Crimmercrock lane" (which is what Hardy makes it in a poem called "The Dark-Eyed Gentleman"), even to suggest that it is or should be "the same" as what "the birds a-perch" in the "roadside elms . . . have" so often "done," is not to revise drastically the prevailing education. It is, rather, to offer but another version of the old, old story which holds that the earthy, sensual life is not a thing to be valued or prized. Far from being the locus of divine mystery, it is, quite the contrary, just about as common as it can be. Lawrence walks away from his casual sexual encounter with a Hardyan subject to return, in thought, to an absent mother. He does so not because the encounter was sexual but, rather, because it was casual. Put another way, the poet ends up in a dark no-man's-land that is outside two realms—the realm of the barn and the realm of the dead—because something in him has managed to make a connection between the two. Speaking of the "anxious" level of the "Hymn to Priapus," I said that Lawrence connects the living lass with the dead mother because if his fear as a poet that, in the words of Hardy's "Dance at the Phoenix," the world in which he "dances" is a world his "father knew." At the deeper level of discourse the same connection is inevitably made, but its meaning is different. Lawrence mentally connects the two women because something in him senses that the image of a discardable reality is the look that old ideals project from just beyond the grave.

In his Study of Thomas Hardy, Lawrence suggests that Hardy began the development of a wonderful, residual, primitive strain of sensuality that existed in Shelley but that Shelley repressed almost out of his poems. Speaking of Shelley's poem "To a Skylark," Lawrence says that although "Shelley wishes to say" that "the skylark is pure, untrammeled spirit," the line "Bird thou never wert," together with the very regular metrics and rhyme scheme of the poem, suggest that the romantic predecessor knows "that the skylark is in fact a bird" and that birds are, in fact, "concrete, momentary thing[s]."⁹ If we think of Hardy's poem entitled "Shelley's Skylark," a lyric in which the recycled organic remains of the bird that Shelley never even saw is pictured "throb[bing] in the myrtle green," we can hear that primitive strain in Hardy that Hardy had heard in Shelley and amplified. That strain, in turn, is recombined by Lawrence with the strain of spirituality that had stood opposed, in Shelley, to the world of earthly sensuality and that Hardy had sought to reject for reasons of its opposition. Beginning with the basic rhetorical model of Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine," which allows the poet to position himself between half-tenable philosophies (the Christianity available is far less attractive than the Hellenism that is not), Lawrence emerges from the Victorian's situation of self-division with what he hopes will be a new poetics of living. Starting with an almost indeterminate act of selfcriticism, he ends up recalling from destructive eminence two dreams that amount to what Hardy might call "twin halves of one . . . august event"—Shelley's spiritual love and Hardy's demystified (or casual) sex.¹⁰ What he will be left with, when the work is complete, is a new creation presided over by a new, quasi-Greek, Sex-God or Priapus.

The arrival at this level of understanding allows us to make sense both of the conclusion and the title of Lawrence's poem. When it is seen solely as the work of a poet obsessed with influence anxiety, the "Hymn to Priapus" makes us wonder just how it is that "Desire comes up, and contentment," makes us wholly unsatisfied by the answer Lawrence provides to the last question he poses:

How is it I grin then, and chuckle
Over despair?

Grief, grief, I suppose and sufficient
Grief makes us free
To be faithless and faithful together
As we have to be.

As the statement of a poet, however, who by having been "faithless and faithful together" to the several influences of his past is emerging from a double sense of dissatisfaction into a unified sense of contentment-in-liberty, the last stanza makes sense enough. And whereas the penultimate stanza is still self-conscious and introspective in the way that all the previous ones have been ("how much do I care?/How do I grin . . . ?"), the final quatrain has a steady, relaxed, matured, conversational tone ("Grief, grief, I suppose . . . makes us free"). The change in sound may not imply that an interlocutor has come on the scene, but it does seem to suggest that the speaker now might be ready for one.

NOTES

¹ It is not necessary to have read biographies of Lawrence to know that the dead beloved is the writer's mother. Look! We Have Come Through!—the volume in which the "Hymn to Priapus" appears—contains at least four poems that seek to be, in the words of one title, "Everlasting Flowers for a Dead Mother."

² My ellipsis stands in place of the word "beneath." I have not quoted the word in my text because although its presence would in no way damage my argument, it seems a wholly diversionary word the logic (or creative illogic) of which I am not sure I can explain. Why would Lawrence say that he is "beneath" his "underground" love? He cannot be accused of having sacrificed sense for a rhyming word, since "beneath" and "death" form only an eye rhyme anyway. Perhaps "beneath" is intended as a figurative, valuative word. (The mother, although dead, still reigns over her son). Or the poet may intend to recall the downward-looking, male Orion in such a way as to make clear the status of both images as symbols of the parental past and yet confuse corpse and constellation just enough to keep either or both of them from being read too autobiographically.

³ Harry T. Moore, The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1962), p. 474.

⁴ Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Chapter 10.

⁵ The four Hardy poems from which I quote are: "Ditty," "At an Inn," "Between Us Now," and "Autumn in King Hintock's Park."

⁶ D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy, collected in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward McDonald (New York: Viking, 1946), p. 459.

⁷ Thomas Hardy, in his elegy entitled "A Singer Asleep," refers to Swinburne's Poems and Ballads as "New words, in classic guise." Hardy's various testimonies to Swinburne's influence can be found in my study of Swinburne, Hardy, Lawrence, and the Burden of Belief, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

⁸ William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book II, 11. 233-41.

⁹ D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy, op. cit., p. 459.

¹⁰ Thomas Hardy, "The Convergence of the Twain," 1. 30.