POETRY REVIEW D H LAWRENCE HUMMING BIRD

Lawrence goes against conventional depictions of the humming-bird as a cheerful symbol of perfect nature and romantic love, to picture it in earlier incarnations as primordial monster, a giant of the age of the dinosaurs, and even before there were any plants and vegetation, which it broke asunder from the soil with its beak.

This humming-bird is a mythical entity, a veritable God, and Lawrence gives the modern humming bird a sense of compression, as if aeons of evolutionary fury have become trapped within it – this is very much a poem of Darwinian wonder.

The closing image of us looking at the humming-bird down the wrong end of a time-telescope and how we should be grateful for that captures his sense that the prehistoric humming-bird would be a terrifying beast to have unleashed in our own time.

In many ways, Humming-bird is a negation of William Blake’s Tiger burning Bright, – this humming bird has lost much of its terrifying power, and he envisages the primal time as being of some other-world, an alternative time line, for of course, no such giant birds ever stalked the skies and nature’s avenues.

There is no mawkish, ‘aw isn’t it sweet’ sentimentalism about this Humming-bird. It is a suppressed creature of immense power and force, much as Lawrence saw human potential.

Arthur Chappell