POETRY REVIEW D H LAWRENCE GENERAL POETRY

Notes on some of the great author’s poetry.

            GYPSY

A man begs a gypsy girl to marry him, inviting her to take complete and total control of his life, and every decision he would otherwise make. He offers her a week’s wages in return for such duties. We are not told how she reacts to his desperate propositions.

          THE LITTLE TOWN AT EVENING

In the shadow of a church, people sleep through the night, content and comforted by their beliefs but Lawrence lies awake wondering why he is left in disbelief and states of insomnia. He envies the town folk for their easy acceptance of faith.

            LOVE ON THE FARM

A woman waits at the farmhouse while her husband is away on a rabbit hunting expedition.  She fetishises herself as the dying rabbit, comparing the rabbit’s death throes in one of her husband’s snares to her own feelings of passion.

Rich in pastoral countryside imagery and sexual metaphor, the poem reads like the more salubrious episodes of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in miniature.

          THIEF IN THE NIGHT

Lawrence suffers from a troubling dream about being robbed in the darkness in his bed, that leaves him waking up feeling as though he has been violated in his sleep and as if some strange nocturnal deity has taken something from inside him.

            VIRGIN YOUTH

The author wakes up in awe, fear and despair at his own sexual preparedness, knowing that no woman is as yet present in his life that will take it from him.

            A YOUTH MOWING

The narrator approaches a field where four men are scything the corn at harvest time, approaching one of them, the youngest of the four with some bad news.

We see that the narrator is a pregnant woman now, and the young man she addresses is just finding out that he is the father of the baby she carries. The bad news is the change imposed on him, and the humiliation of being told of it in front of the other workers. 

Lawrence plays on the surprise revelation of the gender of the narrator superbly in this short gem of a poem.

Arthur, Chappell,