POETRY REVIEW D H LAWRENCE VIOLETS

An astonishing sexually charged ghost story in verse. Shortly after his father’s funeral, a young man stands in the graveyard in the pouring rain, and talks to a nun (the sister), who is praying at the grave or nearby. He points to a figure he sees there, a passing young lady, and asks the nun if she might know who this is.

The nun’s reply if any is not recorded. We see only the questioning by the young man. We learn that his father was quite a heavy drinker and a notorious womaniser. We have no idea if the boy’s mother knew this too. The lifetime of hedonism has apparently contributed to the man’s death, and this mystery woman appears to be one of his former lovers, and even seems to have been seen making love to the ghost of the dead man by his grave in the rain.

As she had opened her coat the violets had been pressed against her breasts and the man takes their place pressing his face there before returning to his coffin. The impression is that being deceased is not going to stop his life of debauchery from continuing. This seems to be his one and only final fling before being rested once and for all in the cemetery (he refers to the graves as the sister’s lot, suggesting that she is a regular presence in the graveyard. 

An odd, quirky poem, as the young man makes no moral judgement on his father’s lifestyle or his posthumous lovemaking. He takes all that very much for granted and treats it as simply matter of fact. He is simply curious as to who the woman is and her role in all of this, but he and we never discover this and the poem gains considerable power from this mystery.

Arthur Chappell.