POETRY REVIEW D H LAWRENCE NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH

Lawrence sees the World in solipsistic terms as a total manifestation of himself, his life, views, desires and opinions.

The wars and atrocities of his World are his self-recriminations and self-punishment. Pain is his flagellation. Any woman he loves is merely a reflection of his love for himself.

He relishes his own violent death, and pictures the whole wretched creation around him dying off with him, as he becomes a dying God, taking his universe with him to oblivion. His violent imagery is comparable to that in the revelation of St John at the close of the New Testament.

Lawrence enjoys being nothing whatsoever, and then he begins to create himself a new World, and a new vision, a doomed attempt to create something and someone completely independent of himself, a completely separate entity.

He realizes quickly that only the totally unknown qualifies as that which is not something of him. Once he can identify with something or someone and label it ore them, it becomes his and him. The unknown, untouched, unseen before becomes merely his current lover in life, and in effect, his wife. It is only being at the height of passion with her that makes him completely lose himself in a sense of death and rebirth. Only at that instant is there an experience of something other than him. His new creation becomes a fleeting one. It becomes the same old violent, corrupt and unsatisfactory World and self as the ecstasy wears off and dissipates.

Lawrence cries in anguish for the unknown to become more lasting and all embracing rather than just a momentary dash of escapism.

A Cartesian, empirical sense of scepticism here – we make what we see and experience into our own thing – there is no objective separate World from ourselves, and even the most total orgasmic sense of passion fulfilled is only a delusion of freedom. Here, the collision between the real and the subjective is captured in violent imagery, but ultimately, it is all just a dream and an illusion. Lawrence knows that what he experiences is just a dream and ultimately unattainable, but it is so good that he strives towards it anyway.

Arthur Chappell