POEM REVIEW -D H LAWRENCE – MEN IN NEW MEXICO

Appropriately set in the short cycle of poems headed with ‘Ghosts’, this is a haunting mystical reflection on the way people drift through their lives achieving nothing of any true worth.

The great mountains of the New Mexican desert landscape are seen as sleeping giants, as if hey once walked but chose to stop and sleep where they were, wrapped in clouds as if curled up in their blankets.

People, in contrast are seen as small and insignificant, almost parasites to the mountain. We clamour on them, drill holes in them, and extract their resources 9silver, coal, etc0, but fail to wake the mountains from their deep rest.

Our own lives are seen as a needless sleep, with our daily activity described as somnambulistic sleepwalking. Life is reduced to being a nightmare from which we can only wake up on death. The gods leave us drifting in this living-dead coma walk. The Indians of the plains and hills se this and take it as read (Lawrence was showing some empathy with their beliefs in this poem). Lawrence describes the Native Americans as offering the promise of a waking from their dreams, only to plunge them into a deeper nightmare, and restless sleep, with their Christian teachings and persecutions, massacres, etc.

Here is Lawrence at the peak of despair, surrounded by some of the greatest landscapes on the planet, the landscape of many a Western Movie, and feeling merely depressed and insignificant. He finds his life fleeting and nothing but an illusion. After al those sleeping mountains have been there for millennia, while human life lasts barely four score years.

A haunting existentialist poem, screaming with angst, but a part of the dream worth dreaming.

Arthur Chappell.