POETRY REVIEW – D H LAWRENCE – MAN AND BAT

During his travels in Florence, Lawrence returns to his lodgings to discover a bat flying round and round frantically in his bedroom. At first he mistakes it for a bird, but quickly realizes that he is watching a very distressed Pipistrelle Bat.

He tries to catch it, to push it outside, but his efforts are frustrated at every turn by the frightened, desperate creature.

The window to the room is open, and the bat seems to be aware of this, but whenever it gets near the aperture, it pulls back and starts circling the room once again.  The poet soon realizes that it is the daylight that frightens the trapped nocturnal creature.  

Lawrence considers simply killing the bat but he cannot bring himself to kill off the poor beast.

Eventually, the bat collapses to the floor in sheer exhaustion. Lawrence picks it up carefully, fearful of being bitten, and wraps it in a jacket, before taking it outside and giving it its freedom. The bat flies off quickly to get out of the sunlight.

Lawrence believes he sees the bat at night later in his stay, flying near, but not into his house, happy to have defeated the Sun and returned to the darkness it loves.

A fun poem, capturing Lawrence’s concern for animals and conservation, a side to his personality rarely touched on by his critics and biographers.

Arthur Chappell