POETRY REVIEW – D H LAWRENCE – THE ASS

A poem of regret and remembrance regarding a once happy and highly regarded creature that is now left looking forlorn and sad (as with A A Milne’s Eeyore).

The Ass has strong memories; after all it once carried Jesus into Jerusalem, and also carried the Virgin Mary to Bethlehem with the unborn Messiah in her womb. Lawrence calls Jesus ‘the first burden’.

Its bleak despairing ey-oring cries come down to the absence of a mare in its life as a means of carrying passengers and freight. It thinks of itself as the jackass, the fool. 

An ass he saw during his travels in Sicily inspired Lawrence, possibly he even used an Ass to ride on or carry his luggage for him. He claims to root his poem in Arabian beliefs about the origin of the Ass’s distinctive cry. The ass was rash enough to fall in love as humans fall in love, rather than merely procreating for the future of its species. Lawrence describes the Ass as baring its teeth in defiant anger at the Sun, and gods of the air for denying him his love and moments of passion.

Lawrence, travelling and ill, found he separated from much that he loved and shows this despair in the eyes the animals in many of his poems.

Arthur Chappell