The Hostile Sun: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence

by Joyce Carol Oates

Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1973

60 pages

Excerpt

Lawrence's poems are blunt, exasperating, imposing upon us his strangely hectic, strangely delicate music, in fragments, in tantalizing broken-off parts of a whole too vast to be envisioned—and then withdrawing again. They are meant to be spontaneous works, spontaneously experienced; they are not meant to give us the sense of grandeur or permanence which other poems attempt, the fallacious sense of immortality that is an extension of the poet's ego. Yet they achieve a kind of immortality precisely in this: that they transcend the temporal, the intellectual. They are ways of experiencing the ineffable "still point" which Eliot could approach only through abstract language.

It is illuminating to read Lawrence's entire poetic works as a kind of journal, in which not only the finished poems themselves but variants and early drafts and uncollected poems constitute a strange unity—an autobiographical novel, perhaps—that begins with "The quick sparks" and ends with "immortal bird." This massive work is more powerful, more emotionally combative, than even the greatest of his novels. Between first and last line there is literally everything: beauty, waste, "flocculent ash," the ego in a state of rapture and in a state of nausea, a divese streaming of chaos and cunning. We know that Yeats fashioned his "soul" in the many-volumed Collected Works of W. B. Yeats quite consciously, systematically, and Lawrence has unconsciously and unsystematically created a similar work. It is shameless, in part; but there are moments of beauty in it that are as powerful as Yeats's more frequent moments. There are moments of clumsiness, ugliness, and sheer stubborn spite, quite unredeemed by any poetic grace, so much so, in fact, that the number of excellent poems is therefore all the more amazing. Ultimately, Lawrence forces us to stop judging each individual poem. The experience of reading all the poems—and their earlier forms—becomes a kind of mystical appropriation of Lawrence's life, or life itself, in which the essential sacredness of "high" and "low," "beauty" and "ugliness," "poetry" and "non-poetry" is celebrated in a magical transcendence of all rationalist dichotomies.

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